Episode Transcript
[00:00:11] Luke Sonnen: Hi, I'm Luke Sonnen. Welcome to The COO Roundtable, powered by PFI Advisors. Here's your host, Matt Sonnen.
[00:00:24] Matt Sonnen: Before we get started, we’d like to invite all of you to try out our operations coaching and community platform, The COO Society, free of charge.
We’re really excited by what we’ve built, and we feel it’s the industry’s first and only RIA-specific online coaching platform for Operations professionals.
The courses, the discussion forum, and our monthly member meetups are all specifically designed for operations professionals at any level; from veteran COOs to new client service associates striving for both professional and firmwide growth.
Find more at COOsociety.com, click the “GET STARTED” button at the bottom of the page.
Again, the website is COOsociety.com, all one word, no payment information is needed to get your free trial started.
Now, on to this month’s episode.
[00:01:15] Matt Sonnen: Welcome, everyone, to episode 44. We're going to call this the Reggie Jackson episode. He was famous number 44. I'm really excited for our two guests today.
They're incredibly thoughtful leaders at their organizations, and we have a great conversation lined up, so let's dive right into it.
Joining us from SYM Financial Advisers, headquartered in Winona Lake, Indiana, is Crystal Creekmore. Crystal is the principal and chief compliance officer at the firm, and everyone knows I like to do my LinkedIn stocking. SYM is the only firm she's worked for since graduating. That is always amazing. I'm very impressed by the fact that Crystal went back and got her MBA about seven years ago while working full time. I always find that very admirable. Congrats on that, Crystal. I also love this little snippet from your bio. It fits in so well with what we talked about here about COOs in general. It says, "There is no job too small for Crystal, and her enthusiasm for our clients, our employees and our firm is contagious." I just love that. With all of that, welcome to The COO Roundtable, Crystal.
[00:02:28] Crystal Creekmore: Thanks, Matt. I'm happy to be here.
[00:02:30] Matt Sonnen: Great. Joining Crystal today is our very first repeat guest here on The COO Roundtable. Gary Bonner is joining us from his new firm, Southwestern Investment Group in Franklin, Tennessee. Gary serves as the firm's new COO. He was featured in our COO white paper back in 2018 when he was the COO at Avalon Investment and Advisory in Houston, Texas.
I had so much fun conducting the interviews for that white paper that we did, that we then decided a few months later that we were going to launch this interview format podcast. The first few guests on the podcast were just the ones that I highlighted in the white paper. Gary was kind enough to join us for episode two back in January of 2019. Then we figured now that he's in a new COO role, we would bring him back. Welcome back, Gary.
[00:03:26] Gary Bonner: Thank you, Matt. It's good to be back with you.
[00:03:28] Matt Sonnen: Great. I guess, Gary, let's start with you. Tell us about the new firm you're at.
[00:03:34] Gary Bonner: I am, as you said, the chief operating officer for Southwestern Investment Group, which we lovely call SWIG. SWIG was founded about 20 years ago, was originally part of a larger organization and several other businesses besides wealth management underneath of it. In late 2021, we partnered with Merchant through a minority investment from them, and we bought ourselves out of the larger company to become completely independent. As you mentioned, we're in Franklin, Tennessee, and for those who don't know where that is, it's just south of Nashville. It's a great market to be in. We just moved our family from Houston about two months ago, and I joined back in March.
We manage around five and a half billion under management with 13,000 clients across the country. We have 176 employees or so in 11 offices in 5 states. Our clients come across the board from the mass affluent to ultra-high net worth, take a planning focus approach to helping our clients to reach the goals that they have and improve their financial lives, and we manage their investment portfolios that are kind of tailored to their needs. Before joining here at SWIG, the growth model has been primarily through organic growth.
[00:04:44] Matt Sonnen: Great. Crystal, tell us a little bit about SYM Financial Advisors.
[00:04:48] Crystal Creekmore: Sure. SYM Financial Advisers, like Matt said, I'm in Winona Lake, Indiana, but we have five offices across Indiana and Michigan. We were founded in 1968, and we're actually on our third generation of ownership, so we're really excited about that. We manage roughly 3.7 billion in assets. I stated on our last ADB, we have around 68 employees, approximately 1,300 clients.
We are a wealth planning firm, so our ideal client would be an individual who needs financial planning services. In addition to portfolio management services, we serve a lot of corporate executives, healthcare professionals, business owners, or retirees or pre-retirees. Also, we do provide services for 401(k)s and nonprofits as well. Same as Gary, we have historically grown organically, and that's our vision for the future, as well as any M&A opportunities that might come along.
[00:05:43] Matt Sonnen: Third generation, I should know the stats, but I think it's like 50% die off when it goes to the second generation, and it's like 90% or something like that. Don't make it to the third. That's incredible, 1968.
[00:05:57] Crystal Creekmore: Yes, we're really proud of that. Right now we have 12 owners.
[00:06:01] Matt Sonnen: Amazing. Gary, we've mentioned Avalon and Southwestern, or SWIG, as you called them. Tell us about your career path that led you to where you are today.
[00:06:11] Gary Bonner: I started my career at Arthur Andersen & Company, which of course, is no longer around. That became Andersen Consulting. Spent a couple of years there in accounting world. Went on to be part of four startup companies. Probably the most recent would be Avalon Advisors as you mentioned. I spent 19 years at Avalon. We grew up from about 450 million under the management of about 60 to 70 client families to 9 billion over the 19 years that I was there.
I served multiple hats that I wore going from a small firm to a big firm, but I was chief operating officer the entire time that I was there. I wore the chief compliance officer hat for a while, or possibly target I guess is a better term sometimes. I was also the chief technology officer. Here at SWIG, I serve as the COO and have a great team that we work with here.
[00:07:04] Matt Sonnen: Crystal, we mentioned that SYM is the only firm you've worked for, which I think is just great. Tell us about the different roles you've held throughout that time and how you landed where you are today. I also should mention that in addition to principal and COO, you also hold the CCO title. Talk to us a little bit about all of that.
[00:07:24] Crystal Creekmore: Sure. Graduated from Indiana University in 2000 with my bachelor's degree in finance and economics. Then, like Matt already mentioned, I went back to college in 2015 and got my MBA, which was really difficult. It was a weekend program, so a lot of hard work, but excited to have that behind me. I'll be honest, when I went to college, it wasn't my dream to become the chief compliance officer. I actually didn't even know what I really wanted to do.
After I graduated, I had different interviews lined up. We're the orthopedic capital of the world here, and we're still where I'm located. I had interviewed at the orthopedic company, more like an accounting role, banking. I interviewed to underwrite insurance, and then ultimately, I landed on the position at SYM here. Kind of a funny story, actually. I actually had never heard of them.
I was just out randomly dropping off my résumé in my hometown, and I saw the word financial in the company names. I thought I might just drop my résumé off here, but I had no clue, anything about SYM, didn't know anyone here. Then when our CEO at the time, he was doing a lot of the hiring, his name is Jerry Yeager, he's still here. He looked at my résumé, and obviously he's a big IU fan, and so that caused attention. Then he noticed where I went to high school and what school district I would have been in. His mother-in-law is a schoolteacher. So he called his mother-in-law and said, "What do you know about Crystal?" She said, "Oh, she was great in kindergarten. You have to interview her." Anyways, it just makes us laugh every time we think of that story. That's how I got my foot in the door here at SYM.
In all seriousness, like I said, I started in 2000. We had roughly, gosh, probably three / four million in assets. It's really exciting thinking in the last 22 years, going from 300 million to 3.7 billion.
When I first started, I started as a client service representative. I did that for several years and then I moved on to the financial care planner role. I was a trader, did that for a couple of years and then I quickly realized I wasn't really interested in going down the advisor path but my true passion was more in the back office dealing with operations and compliance. Then I went down the ops and management path for probably 10 years. Then ultimately when our CCO retired, it was a natural place for me to move into as the chief compliance officer role in 2016.
[00:09:41] Matt Sonnen: We have two first. Gary is the first repeat guest on The COO Roundtable, and I guarantee you, over 43 previous episodes, you're the first person that got their job due to a referral from her kindergarten teacher.
[00:09:57] Crystal Creekmore: Right.
[00:09:58] Matt Sonnen: That's amazing. That is amazing. You both have brought up chief compliance officer, so let's talk about that dual role. We see that role's held by the same person quite a bit. I, myself was a dual hated COO and CCO back in my COO days and many of our former guests have worn both hats. Crystal, how do you juggle both?
[00:10:29] Crystal Creekmore: My primary title is chief compliance officer like I mentioned. No matter what I'm doing, I always, always, always have my compliance hat on first. I meet regularly with our leadership team, our service team, our marketing department, IT department, investment department. My primary goal is just to understand everything that's going on throughout the firm, in the different departments. I want to make sure everyone's compliant, I want to make sure we're keeping up with all the new rules and regulations, everyone's properly trained. That's first and foremost.
Then given my exposure throughout the company over the last 22 years, no matter what I'm working on, I also always have my operations head on saying, "Okay, is there any additional operational efficiencies we can take away from whatever the project is at hand? Are there systems and processes that we can improve or enhance? Are there new rules and regulations that we have to adjust our processes too? Do we need additional training on those? Are we keeping our vendors accountable?" The list goes on and on and on.
Ultimately, this requires a lot of involvement from various people and departments and we all have to work together, it's not just me. I always like to make sure everyone understands, to us here at SYM, the big thing is making sure we have buy-in from the top. No matter what, if it's operations compliance, marketing, we always have the buy-in from the top down.
At all of our quarterly meetings, our CEO, he stands in front of everyone and we talk about all this stuff, we call it four corners. During the meeting, he puts all of us on the spot and I talk about compliance corner, we talk about HR corner, IT corner, marketing corner, just so we can keep everyone apprised of what's going on throughout the organization.
Again, my primary goal is just to understand everything going on, making sure it's running smoothly and efficiently in the background while providing exceptional client service. Obviously, I know there's a lot of varying opinions on this. This is just what works for us to have me in charge of both and given my experience and having been with the firm so long, it just made sense for me to move into the CCO role once it was available.
[00:12:34] Matt Sonnen: When we get contacted by RAs and they say, "Hey, PFI, can you let us know if we're running efficiently." One of the first things we do is, "Let us look at your compliance manual." They say, "No, no, no, I don't need a compliance audit" I go, "No, I understand." But at most RIAs - both of you are larger than average RAs, but at most, the compliance manual is are the closest thing any RIA has to an operations manual. We like going through that and then then walking through, "These are the things the SEC tells you to do, but we want to ask how you're doing it, are you doing it efficiently, and are you getting it done on time, et cetera?" I see a huge overlap in the two roles. Gary, you're split now. You're COO by yourself but you said in your previous role, you were a dual hated. Talk to us about your thoughts on one person carrying the burden of both of those roles.
[00:13:28] Gary Bonner: I had that hat for a while at Avalon. I'm glad that I did, provided a lot of context than what the regulators are looking for. I think it made me probably a better COO knowing and having been in that role. Frequently, I'd have advisors come to me and just ask me questions about the RIA side of compliance, but we had become a limited-purpose broker-dealer while at Avalon, so we brought in a really good FINRA CCO to take that role, take the hat away. From the RIA side, having the background, having sat in front of the SEC through two exams while I was there, I think did provide me with a lot of insight and how to mitigate risk in the business, how to make decisions that are both good operationally as well as good from a compliance perspective, but as we grew - especially here at SWIG, we have a lot of people and I think in a smaller organization where we had started at Avalon, it was easy to wear that multiple hats and to have conversations with people and be able to spend time in both roles. But as we grew, there's such a burden on both compliance to ensure that we stay compliant, making sure at least here we have lots of offices and our CCO does a great job of communicating out to all the offices. For me, I can't imagine doing both roles maintaining the operations side of the firm with cybersecurity and operations and IT and everything else that goes into operations versus what goes into compliance and being able to do that well, just having to split the time, because both roles are equally important. I think working with a good CCO is always best for me as COO to view that as a partnership and then more largely as a leadership team having good heads in all the roles so that we can work together as a team. Again, from my perspective, I think it's better to have it separated.
[00:15:32] Matt Sonnen: I don't know what the inflection point is, but you're at 176 employees. Clearly, having individuals in both roles makes sense. But like I said, the average RA, I think it does make sense to have both, and I'm sure you and the CCO are meeting very regularly and working very closely on all of these initiatives.
[00:15:57] Gary Bonner: Anything that comes up from the advisory side questions or whatever that I might get, I've been doing what I'm calling a listening tour. So I'm going out and meeting with all the advisory teams over the first couple months and I'm here so I'm visiting every office. I'm about halfway done right now and just asking a standard set of questions so things that usually come out of that around operations or can I do this or can I do that? Usually, I just refer back to our CCO, and then she will step in and help provide the guidance there.
[00:16:29] Matt Sonnen: Another topic that we talk about quite a bit here on the podcast, because a lot of firms struggle finding the right organizational structure that works best for them, there's clearly pros and cons to each, but the question always comes down to whether or not you centralize your operational processes or do you allow your advisory teams to work in operational silos, I call them. Crystal, I'll go to you first on this one. How are you guys structured?
[00:16:56] Crystal Creekmore: At SYM, we definitely centralize our operational processes. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have five different office locations. I often get the question, "Crystal, how do you know what the other offices are doing? How do I monitor them?" It just makes me chuckle because even though we have five different offices, it literally feels like we're all under the same roof since we are centralized and we're performing the same processes in the back office.
One of the CSRs here in my office at the headquarters, they might be opening account or scheduling a meeting and they're doing it exactly the same way as a CSR in a Michigan office. Same thing with trading. We can have traders in any office, we have a centralized trading department platform, they're using the same workflows, the same software. The same thing with planners, we have a centralized way of creating our financial plan. Obviously, the output, the recommendations, all that stuff specific to each individual client's needs, but the back office is centralized.
To us, it's what's worked really well, it's really helped speed up our training process, it's cut down on mistakes. We find it extremely valuable. The last thing I'd probably add to this is even though we are centralized in the back office, we do think it's really important that each client has a dedicated advisor and a dedicated CSR. We think that helps with the client relationship and enhances the client's experience, but to answer your question, we are centralized on the back office.
[00:18:21] Matt Sonnen: Great. Gary, how is SWIG structured?
[00:18:25] Gary Bonner: We have more of a decentralized view. We have advisory teams across all the offices. Each team manages itself, manages its own client all over here, inbound request from a client to an advisor on a phone call and that team is responsible for ensuring that that client's taken care of. I think from our perspective, it's just a higher personal touch to those end clients, I think the advisor probably more informed on what's happening with his individual clients and if we had handed it off to a centralized group, we still rely on our custodian for backend money movements and all that but for the most part, we handle it at the advisory team level.
[00:19:08] Matt Sonnen: There's no right or wrong way to do it, just whatever works for each individual firm. One of the challenges of centralizing the back office is how does everyone keep tabs of who's doing what, and what is the status on certain projects or tasks? If the advisory teams are broken into smaller service groups, it's a bit easier for that team to just keep track of everything, but with a centralized back office, advisors often feel that they're in the dark and continue to ask, "Where are we on the Smith transfer of assets? Or did the wire go out for Mrs. Jones, whatever it may be. Gary, how have you solved for that communication at SWIG?
[00:19:49] Gary Bonner: That's one of the reasons we've kept our team separate and having them oversee their clients - just to be able to not have to ask those questions and have to call into a central location. We're using a proprietary CRM, but that right now is not capturing that information so nobody can really log in and see where the status is. As we expand here, we'll look at adding that functionality through a CRM where there's workflow and tickets created, people can log in, but again, we'll probably won't deviate from it being done at a team level. We'll keep it at a team level and the team can just log in and see where things are.
[00:20:25] Matt Sonnen: Crystal, I think that's exactly how you guys are doing it through CRM, correct?
[00:20:29] Crystal Creekmore: Exactly. We rely heavily on our CRM to keep track of everything. I think the last time I counted, we had roughly 200 workflows in the system. Obviously, that didn't happen overnight. It was a long process, took a lot of time building out all those workflows, but basically for every task, there's a corresponding workflow with all the steps required to complete the task.
At any time, the advisor can log into CRM, see exactly where we're at on the transfer, the wire, whatever the task might be, plus in addition to that, we send our advisors a report every morning, they can see all the deposits and withdrawals that were made in their client's accounts, any trades that our trading team place the previous day, they can see all of that at their fingertips.
Again, like I said, we have a dedicated advisor and CSR for each client. To the client, they still have that team environment, the CSR, and advisors for that specific client are aware of everything that's going on for that client. They have weekly meetings collaborating and talking about different stuff that they need to be discussing related to those clients. That's super helpful and the advisor can ask questions at that point if there's anything they're unsure of, or they want an update on something.
At the end of the day, I don't feel like our advisors feel like they're left in the dark. And we actually encourage our advisors to stay in their own lane and let the CSR run with these tasks. They can be out meeting with clients, talking to prospects, driving new business. In our eyes, it's just what works for us. The big benefit of doing it this way is if someone is out unexpectedly, anyone can easily fill in because we're following the same processes and the status of where we're at on these tasks, the paperwork is saved in a document management system. It's just super easy for someone to fill in and our turnaround times don't suffer.
[00:22:18] Matt Sonnen: Well, with that last question, we were really focused on internal communication and keeping everyone abreast of what's going on at the RA, but I want to shift now to how your firms are communicating with your clients and keeping them informed on what's happening in their portfolios. Our industry is definitely undergoing a shift away from the static performance reports that we print or we bring to the meeting four times a year or maybe email to the client four times a year. Many firms are now relying on their client portal, either the portal embedded in their performance reporting tool or the one that comes with their financial planning tool. Crystal, how is SYM leveraging your portal?
[00:22:58] Crystal Creekmore: I love this question, Matt. You're exactly right. It's always bothered me when we used to send quarterlies to our clients. By the time they received it, it was 10 days still. This is a topic I'm very passionate about. A couple of years ago, we decided to make our client portal a priority. It was a project I worked on. It was a really fun project building out the portal.
I know immediately some people's antennas are going off, "Hey, why would you spend so much time and money investing in a portal when you can read the industry magazines? The adoption rates are so low." I get that, but for us, the first reason we wanted to do the client portal was because we have a client survey every three to four years and a lot of our clients were asking about the client portal. In this day and age, with technology at everyone's fingertips, they were asking for it, they wanted it, so we wanted to do it for that reason first and foremost, and we wanted to stay competitive, and then we wanted to enhance the overall client experience. That was first, big-picture reasoning.
The second reasoning we wanted to invest so much time and money in the portal was because we wanted not only to add value to the clients, but we wanted to add tremendous value to the SYM team. Like you said, it takes time to run quarterly, to mail them, to email them, all that stuff takes time. It takes time to do meeting prep, or maybe there's extra reports you have to run to take to a meeting. All that stuff takes time, so what we did was we designed the portal a few years ago. I sat down and I met with every advisor and team member and said, “In addition to the performance reports, what other reports do you find useful in your meetings, or what questions are coming up in your meetings, and what do you have to come back to the office to research?” Then, obviously, you got to turn around, get back to the client, get back to the CSR, the list can just go on and on.
What we ended up doing, we built a portal with everything that people would possibly use. Then fast forward to today, whenever we had a client meeting, clients coming into my office here in Winona Lake, they're in our board room, we actually log directly into the client's portal view. We project that up on our TV screen, and we run the whole meeting directly out of their portal.
Again, instead of having to spend all that time running reports, printing reports, getting a folder ready, it's all automated with the way that we built the portal. It happens every morning. All these reports get updated, it's live , the advisor is easily able to go - if they have a capital gains question, I have that built into the portal. If the client wants to donate highly appreciated stock, they can go - there's a view for that so they can see exactly what lot each position has and what would make the most sense to donate if that's what the client wants to do. We have all that built into the portal.
For us, it was not only doing it for the client but then to add operational efficiencies from SYM's perspective. Do we encourage our clients to log into the portal every day and look at performance? Absolutely not, but we know that the information's available. If they want to see it, it's there. Anyways, that's worked for us. In the end, we felt like it was a win-win. Our clients were happy, the data is alive. It's no longer static meeting prep time was reduced drastically so our teams can focus on more important items to help the clients reach the goal instead of some of this manual report generation stuff.
[00:26:20] Matt Sonnen: I think Gary and I have talked about this, so I'll go to you here in one second, Gary. I think you're right. The adoption rates, the number of clients that proactively log in to look at their portfolio, a lot of clients just say, "Hey, I've given you discretion, I just don't want to go back to work. You take care of it." A lot of this stuff goes over in my head, but the way you're, you're driving the meeting through the portal is a little different. I like that a lot.
[00:26:49] Crystal Creekmore: It's worked really well. Then it's allowed our clients to see it, but like you said, if they don't want to use it after the meeting, we don't care at all. We know it's better for us operationally and it is available if they want it, but we're not forcing it down anyone's throat.
[00:27:04] Matt Sonnen: That's great. Gary, like I said, you and I have talked about this a lot. What are your thoughts on portal use in general and how have you solved for this at your new firm?
[00:27:15] Gary Bonner: Matt, I think, going off of what Crystal had said, client reporting portal is a really important tool for both the advisors and clients, but on any given day, especially at my old firm, we ran the statistics on this – the usage by the advisors was much greater on a percentage basis than the percent of clients that logged in on any given day. For the advisors, that would allow them to log in, see a client's portfolio, how are the investments doing? Are we meeting the goals that we need to meet for the client? For clients, we looked at the numbers, we had about 10% of our clients that logged in a couple of times a week. We had about 25% to 35% that had logged in the last month or two. Then we had about 50% of our clients that never logged in once we set up their login ID and some of them never logged in at all, not to even set up a user ID.
As you mentioned, adoption rates are low, but I think it's really important, and Crystal highlighted this from the operations perspective for an advisor to be able to log in, be able to choose from the list of its clients, go in and see something that he wants to see versus having to go find the information somewhere else and use the portal from an operations perspective.
I think if you're going to spend the money on a client portal and you want to ensure that's the best experience for both the client and the advisor, we're currently looking at providers that will enhance both client and the advisor engagementrather than just lumping together a CRM and a portal. We want something looking at a solution that might be better on both fronts.
[00:28:49] Matt Sonnen: Well, another topic that we discuss quite a bit, it's come up quite often on the podcast, is the book Traction and the entrepreneurial operating system or EOS. Many of the firms that we've had on the podcast have adopted EOS and are running their firms on that framework. We went really deep on EOS in episode 42 with Christy Clayton and Melissa Bushman. If anyone wants to learn more about EOS, definitely go check out that episode, but I know that both SYM and SWIG are running on EOS as well. Crystal, tell us how long ago you adopted it and how you use it to drive the firm forward.
[00:29:33] Crystal Creekmore: Sure. We adopted the EOS framework about five years ago. Definitely one of the best investments we've ever made. Like I mentioned earlier, we are in our third generation of ownership so the process really made the current owners stop and reevaluate: what is our core focus? what is our core target, our core values? and then spend a lot of time, where do we see ourselves in one year? three years? five years? The whole exercise was very, very valuable.
What we also loved about the EOS process was that it really helped create leadership paths and structure for the next generation. Then, obviously, like I already said: the core values, that piece was huge. We've always had a good culture here at SYM but the EOS process made it even better and helped teach us how to better communicate the core values with our people, how to build momentum around them. We hire, we train, we promote based on these core values which for our firm they’re: Service, Integrity, Teamwork, and Results - are what our core values are.
We spend time at every single quarterly meeting - and that's something my CEO's really excited about. That's probably his favorite part of the meeting. Let's just take time. We tell three to five core value stories at our quarterly meeting. We have various people throughout the firm talk about different core value stories of things that we did for clients or things that we did for coworkers. How that plays into our core values: it just really highlights the great people that we have and how everyone's living day in and day out by these core values. That was super cool.
The other stuff, as far as what EOS has done for us, the accountability has been huge. Just as we continue to grow, we all need to be rowing in the same direction. The accountability that it's brought to the whole organization to each department, that's been amazing.
The other thing is we have weekly leadership meetings. I remember when we first got introduced to the idea, there's seven of us on the leadership team, we all thought, "How in the world are we going to give up 90 minutes of our week every week to have--" They call it an L10 meeting. That is the best 90 minutes of the week. Every Monday morning at nine o'clock, we all get together and it's dedicated time. We only miss the meeting if there's a death in the family or you're on vacation. Literally, we are able to solve so many issues so much quicker because before EOS, it was hard to get ahold of everyone. You didn't have that dedicated time. It's just really great to be able to stay informed of what's going on in the organization, be able to discuss issues, solve them much quicker than what we've ever been able to do in the past, so that's been great.
The last thing I would add is just one of the biggest takeaways of the EOS process is breaking these big projects down into smaller-- They call it 90-day rocks. Prior to EOS, you might have this huge project. Maybe it was my portal project. "Oh, my goodness, how am I going to get all this done in the year?" You feel overwhelmed, it's hard to get started. Now you understand what the ultimate goal is at the end of the year but then you break it down into 90-day bite-size pieces and that has helped move our company forward. Each department is breaking these big projects down into 90-day rocks and we're just amazed at how many more projects we've been able to complete.
In the end, I could go on for hours talking about the process, but we love it. It's working great for our organization. I'm happy to talk offline to anyone that's considering it.
[00:32:51] Matt Sonnen: Amazing. Gary, how are you guys using EOS?
[00:32:57] Gary Bonner: Prior to me coming here, the team had been introduced to EOS and had been using it. My first day at SWIG was actually at our quarterly planning meeting for the second quarter. The board and the management team meet offsite for a day and go through and whiteboard what the rocks are going to be - breaking things down into tasks and then assigning responsibility. It's a very collaborative environment here that we have and following the EOS traction philosophy and creating our values and each week, we don't meet on Mondays like Crystal does, we meet on Tuesday morning at 8:30 to 10 each week.
Similar philosophy, you'll need this if you're on vacation or death in the family or something significant happens but we go through and we try to start the meeting with reading what our values are to get everybody focused on what we're there for. Then we follow the steps and follow the normal L10 process and go through the to-dos and the IDF and all the different components.
To Crystal's point, it's a great process to have and it's a great way to run an organization and run a meeting and feel like you've walked out of there accomplishing a bunch of things and getting ready for the next week where we're going to meet again. Also highly recommend it to any firm that's interested in being more efficient and being more focused on running the business in a much better way.
[00:34:28] Matt Sonnen: Christie Clayton was talking a lot about this, that the role of the integrator, obviously, that's in the EOS framework, you've got your visionary and then an integrator - the integrator really is the COO and so I think that's why it keeps coming up on this podcast is because I think a lot of COOs have taken on that role of integrator and that the whole firm rolls up to them and the buck stops with them. It's fantastic. I'm learning more and more about it thanks to Christie. I've already read a couple of the books that she had recommended about it and I'm trying to get up to speed on it but it does sound fantastic. It's obviously doing great things for both of your firms, so it's great.
Crystal and Gary, I can't thank you enough for being here. I should say, Gary, thanks for being here again! You both are so articulate of how you're running your businesses. We've learned a lot from both of you today. So thanks again for taking time out of your busy schedules. You're both juggling a lot. So thank you both to Crystal and Gary.
[00:35:28] Crystal Creekmore: Thanks, Matt.
[00:35:28] Gary Bonner: Thank you, Matt.
[00:35:29] Matt Sonnen: That is a wrap on the Reggie Jackson episode here at number 44. We will talk to everybody soon.
