Episode 82: Hannah Koch & Joe Walker

The COO Roundtable with Matt Sonnen Episode 82 – Hannah Koch & Joe Walker [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Luke Sonnen. Welcome to The COO Roundtable, powered by Coldstream Wealth Management. Here's your host, Matt Sonnen. [00:00:14] Matt Sonnen: Welcome, everyone, to Episode 82. I know I start every episode by saying we've got some really talented and thoughtful operations professionals with us today, but the truth is we've been really lucky to always seem to get the caliber of folks that come on to share their thoughts and experiences with us. [00:00:30] I'm always so impressed when I'm doing the pre-calls, the prep calls for these - I learn so much from our guests as we talk about what topics we want to hit, and today is no exception. We have a really great conversation lined up. So, let's jump right into it. First off, we have the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Altair Advisers in Chicago, Illinois: Hannah Koch. Her bio reads, "Hannah works to ensure the CEO's vision is supported, whether through project execution or relevant partnerships. As leader of the project management team, Hannah leads her team in the design, development, management, and implementation of initiatives from business case development through to execution." [00:01:13] And I'm going to let her go into her career path here in just a second, but I know she's not going to brag about herself, so I'm going to do it for her. Hannah graduated magna cum laude from DePaul University with a bachelor's degree in finance, and she's also in pursuit of her master's degree from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. [00:01:31] So welcome to the podcast, Hannah. [00:01:34] Hannah Koch: Thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciate being here. Looking forward to the conversation and learning from both you and Joe. [00:01:40] Matt Sonnen: Perfect. And, ah, poor Joe - Joe Walker. He has to follow all of that about Hannah. Joe is the COO at Bradley Foster & Sargent - BFS has nine office locations and Joe works out of the Hartford, Connecticut office. [00:01:55] I met Joe almost 20 years ago. He was running an IT consulting firm called UNAPEN back then, and I was working on my very first breakaway. I had to build two offices and I had no clue what I was doing and Joe was - he was so patient with me and he was so knowledgeable, and I am forever grateful for what he taught me all those years ago. [00:02:16] Today as the COO at $9 billion Bradley Foster & Sargent, Joe manages the daily activities of the Client Service, Technology, and Operations teams. In addition, he supports BFS's leadership team and their related compliance, finance, and strategic initiatives. So Joe, welcome to the podcast. [00:02:37] Joe Walker: Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. I was really thrilled when I got an email saying, oh, you should really meet this guy Matt Sonnen. And I was like, I think I already have. Yeah. So, it's great to be here and reconnecting and talking about the things that we've all worked hard at over these years. [00:02:57] Matt Sonnen: Great. Well, Hannah, I'm going to let you kick us off. Tell us a little bit about Altair Advisors. [00:03:04] Hannah Koch: Altair was founded in 2002 by former Arthur Andersen wealth consultants, who wanted to build something independent and truly client focused. So today we manage about $9 billion in assets and have roughly 78 employees. [00:03:19] Our focus is on high net worth individuals and families who want comprehensive wealth guidance. We take a pretty collaborative approach with our clients. We work closely with their attorneys, accountants, and other outside advisors because we really value, I think, the team that surrounds the client. Our ideal client is someone who's really engaged in the relationship, someone open to delegation and respects the expertise of their advisors, and they value access to private investments as well. And honestly, what matters I think the most to us is that they're good people. Cultural alignment, I think, is a really big deal at Altair. [00:03:57] Matt Sonnen: Great. Well, Joe, give us the rundown on BFS. [00:04:02] Joe Walker: You're going to hear a lot of similarities between Hannah and myself and our firms, I think the people part of things being top of that list, and we'll talk about that as we kind of thread our way through this interview, I know. But BFS was formed in 1994. And it's interesting, our current growth trajectory kind of is kind of reminiscent of the original formation of the firm, which was: Joe Sargent broke away from Conning as Conning was really focusing on their core institutional asset management business and had all of this individual high net worth individual business that they didn't quite know how it fit in. And Joe spun off with the blessing of the Conning folks, spun off with that body of business and then coupled up with Rob Bradley, who had helped launch Boston Private, and then Tim Foster came along as the founder of Arcadia Asset Management. So, the firm's beginning was really in this combination of great personalities and similar interests, but also opportunistic M&A, in the sense that Tim was looking to grow and didn't necessarily want to do all the things that you do as an independent RIA. So we remain independent, we're employee-owned, and we're kind of very true to that original vision of bespoke portfolios, tax awareness for - as Hannah put it - highly engaged families. We're really looking for clients, and we're very successful with clients, who are looking to partner with us and with their other professionals for success. So here we are at $9 billion. It's hard to believe that the firm's grown so rapidly over the last five years since I got here, but it's been quite a journey. [00:06:06] Matt Sonnen: Well, I talked a little bit about UNAPEN, Joe, and how we met, but tell us your career story of how you got to BFS. [00:06:13] Joe Walker: It's kind of - it's had its share of twists and turns, so I think if I go back to the very beginning, I was really kind of an electronics or hardware nerd in the early years. So doing my undergraduate work in the Seattle area, I all of a sudden discovered that maybe software was the way that I would be more successful and have fewer frustrations. And boy, was I wrong about that; software was every bit as frustrating as hardware design, but I was fortunate enough to be in a part of the country in the early eighties that was really a great place to be. And so I had my tech beginnings at Deck West and with some of the early folks at Microsoft and then got an opportunity to jump out to - or jump back home really to the Boston area and join up with Franklin Companies. And what they were doing was totally fascinating to me. They were at the very beginning of social screening and socially conscious investing, SRI or ESG, which is really a - I guess a - not such a great thing these days. But really their premise was remarkably simple, which was, hey, if we put portfolios together considering two bottom lines - a financial bottom line and a good corporate governance in a very holistic way, then we're more likely to succeed than not. And that was work that had no tools. So it was phenomenal for me to begin my career in the industry, really creating all those tools. [00:07:48] And then that kind of dragged me into the FinTech world where I did a couple different startups and UNAPEN, which is what Matt mentioned, and really found that, again, the world needed more thought about how things work together. And so I shifted my focus really on strategic and operational due diligence and technology was kind of an also-ran in that mix and then did bank wealth tech at a large regional bank and then found myself at BFS. [00:08:21] And kind of a full circle back to the RIA world that I started out in, in Boston in 1984. So it's been - it's been a journey. [00:08:30] Matt Sonnen: I love it. That's great. Well, Hannah, give us your career path. [00:08:35] Hannah Koch: Yeah, mine is, I think, not as tenured as Joe's. Mine - I have had a lot of different positions at Altair. My first spot was actually as a client service intern in college, and my boss, who's now Altair's CEO, Beka (Rebekah Kohmescher), came back from maternity leave when all the other interns had gone home to college, and I was living in Chicago, being a student at DePaul. And she's like, what are you still doing here? And I just love working here. She's like, you need to go get a job and I don't have one for you at the present time. So I went to go search for what I thought was another wealth management consulting position, and it turned out on the first day, they're like, great, we actually need you to do, ah, technology management. [00:09:20] So I, you know, which is hilarious for, I think, a college grad to be thrust into being a management consultant anywhere. But that's another conversation. [00:09:33] Joe Walker: Not the first time it's happened, Hannah. [00:09:37] Hannah Koch: And I think through that I was cutting my teeth very quickly in the health insurance space on large data sets, database structure reporting, and I kept in contact with Altair during that time and the same boss, Beka, said, you know, I really need someone to help us manage a lot of the data structuring we have here. Altair, again, from building from Arthur Andersen days and having sort of this entrepreneurial mindset for our founders built a lot of our work - a lot of our systems and structure. [00:10:12] So, and you'll kind of hear that theme throughout, I think, today's conversation. So I was brought back to sort of help manage what was very quickly a living, breathing system for the firm. So I had to learn all of our proprietary technology. I spent a lot of time thinking through build versus buy decisions, started to get more comfortable with the vendor relationships, and started to be really thoughtful of what we had built in-house because it was quite extensive. That experience led me to form our project management office and then eventually into my current role as Director of Strategic Initiatives, where I help oversee the implementation of those projects tied to Altair's long-term strategy. [00:10:56] My career has always kind of lived at this intersection of technology, operations, and people. So early on I think I learned that the hardest problems were never technical problems, they were human problems. And that realization has kind of helped shape my approach to leadership and transformation at Altair. So I've been here for a long time, but I've seen a lot and learned a whole lot along the way. [00:11:20] Matt Sonnen: Well, you touched on it a little bit right there. Both of you have such a deep history in technology. I was, you know, looking at your bios and I'm thinking, well these - before I met both of you - these are going to be tech futurists. [00:11:32] But in talking with both of you leading up to this recording, you both said to me that before you can get to the technology, you have to think through the process and you have to think about how the people are going to implement those processes before you can even consider which technology solution you want to choose. [00:11:48] So you touched on it a little bit there, Hannah, but walk us through your thinking. [00:11:52] Hannah Koch: Yeah. I have a pretty strong belief that technology should enable good behavior and not force it. I definitely tried to force it earlier in my career and that just led to a lot of failures. But I think what I learned through that is if you automate a bad process, all you've done is created a bigger, faster problem. [00:12:12] So with the learning that I have, we always now start with the business problem and not the technology. I think a good example of this is how we moved a long-standing open text communication we had between our client service group and our operations group to really run any process in the firm. It worked for a long time. But it - for going and referencing, you know, an audit of 20 years' history for some clients on - okay, what'd they do in 2004 again to, you know, why are - what were those instructions? So it definitely served a purpose. But it was not something that was scalable in any way or leading us to the future. [00:12:54] So we recognized truly that there was a problem. But before we touched any software, we mapped the real workflows, not, you know, the theoretical process, but how things actually moved and worked. And I think to do that well, we handed it to the people that were actually doing the work. My project manager, who is just a miracle worker, led the operations and client service teams to really go through the nuances together. And I think that part was critical. The people felt heard about their work, not dictated down to - this is what your new work is. And only after that did we build the technology. So from there, truly understanding their workflows, understanding the nuance, we were able to embed those into active forms within Practifi, which is our Salesforce overlay. And I think it was by and large a success, the tech work, because the people and process came first. [00:13:50] Matt Sonnen: Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. Well, Joe, you had a great quote when we were talking about this. You said it's people, process, technology in that order, which I love, so comment on that for us. [00:14:04] Joe Walker: Yeah, I think we're in a people business, and I always laugh when I go to conferences and they talk about, you know, the march of AI and automation models, and kind of a mechanized approach to achieve scale. And I laugh because at the end of the day, this business has been and continues to be people approaching people for solutions, and so, so every once in a while you run into somebody who is, you know, maybe very quantitatively oriented and might ask you very specific questions about your large cap growth strategy or something like that. But as a general rule, it's kind of like, who are you and how do you do business? And are you going to be able to answer questions that are really specific, like, am I doing okay and are my kids going to be fine? And stuff like that. So I think you have to start with that basis. If your business is based on a service business, based on people interacting effectively with other people, then you've got to start with people and getting great people, retaining great people, and then setting them up for these really phenomenal interactions with each other and with clients and with the people who are along that, you know - a part of that ecosystem. [00:15:27] And then, so, the utopian view would be, just find great people and you'll be all set. And that doesn't work either. Because great people tend to think independently and you can get this constellation of intellect and excellence without a guiding force and without guardrails and so forth. And that's the process part of things, which is: help people be their best and do their best in their interactions within the organization and outside of the organization. And so, that's stuff like client journeys, that's stuff like standard operating procedures. You know, in our new world it's, you know - it's how we build agent technology that to assist people with those types of interactions. But really give people a way to add some certainty, some discipline, some predictability in a very unpredictable world. [00:16:22] Because we live in a very unpredictable world, and that's been financial services since day one. But these days it's even more unpredictable for a variety of reasons. And then finally, this idea as technology of technology as some, uh, you know, a sort of accelerant to the whole picture. But it's, you know, you don't want to add the accelerant before you've got everything put together. [00:16:48] And so I think it's really important that people understand that they own certain outcomes and that the process they're supposed to walk is real clear, and they have the sense there, and then the technology makes all that stuff work. So, that's kind of a mouthful, so I'll pause right there. [00:17:05] Matt Sonnen: Yeah. Well, if we're gonna talk about technology in the RIA space in 2026, unfortunately, the conversation always has to include AI these days. And so I was pleased in talking with both of you, with your deep understanding of technology, you both are right where I am, is - you're not convinced that where AI stands today, that it's the savior that everyone is declaring it to be. Someday, maybe, but not where it is today. So Joe, why don't you tackle that one first and then we'll let Hannah weigh in. [00:17:37] Joe Walker: Yeah. You know, I just alluded to it in the agent reference, but we look at this as - I think we, you know, we started getting inquiries about AI and what AI would mean from, you know, people who worked within the organization as well as our savvier clients, some of whom came out of technology backgrounds themselves. [00:18:00] And our approach was, well, we're not going to do anything until we had really grounded ourselves in a data governance model, and so boring, boring, boring. Like, I wasn't talking about fun stuff like which LLM and you know, all kinds of great stuff that everybody really wanted to talk about for the last couple years. [00:18:24] It's like, I kind of look at LLMs and the people who produce that technology as that's going to be a commodity item, you'll be able to swap in whatever you want. So, what we need to do is think about, you know, what's our data look like and how do we do this in such a way that we leverage our data, we protect its, you know, its privacy, and we understand its provenance - that we always know where it comes from and where our gold copies are and so forth. [00:18:56] And then once you start doing that, then you set yourself up for these great outcomes where you can use the tools that are available right now to be kind of, you know, productivity enhancing. But in terms of saying to the AI, build a portfolio for me, you know, I just don't think we're there and I'm not sure that's really - you know, I think there's going to be a place for that in certain environments, but I wouldn't say that we're looking at AI replacing the advisor by any stretch of the imagination. So you kind of look at this and say, in our business, in a highly regulated people business, you do governance, you do data, and you do workflows, and then - then you start to have something that's the basis for success. [00:19:46] Matt Sonnen: Yeah. Well, Hannah, what are your thoughts on AI and where we are with it today? [00:19:50] Hannah Koch: Yes. I was laughing, Joe, at some of your comments. Yeah: boring, boring, boring. I felt that, because so many people step in my office like, what are you - what's the hold-up? And it's governance. So, so true. And it's not so much the hold-up as a sort of a pause in, what's the intent? Why do you need this tool? Is it because it's shiny and exciting? Like, what is it doing for the broader business? I think AI is really powerful, but in a fiduciary business, "mostly right" isn't good enough. And AI is often "mostly right." So it really can't substitute judgment, to Joe's point, you know, it can enhance decision making, but it's not going to replace professional responsibility, context with a client, or really, you know, accountability. So I think for Altair, it's really similar to Joe's statements. It's being intentional about where we're applying it. We've leveraged Copilot more and more extensively to start to get people's feet wet - you know, even just the training for users has been quite a slow walk. Where I use AI very often; you know, I try to stay with the curve, but then taking steps back of, how do you prompt, what are effective prompts to get closer to the answer you're looking for, and then how do you validate that detail? So that training has been pretty paramount for us. But I think for us, it's - yes, improving efficiency and consistency, but not compromising trust. [00:21:30] So we've been very slow and intentional of having any type of client exposure to AI. It's really more operations than anything else. [00:21:40] Joe Walker: I'm glad you mentioned this idea of validation, Hannah, because I don't see enough focus on that in the industry or, you know, in the larger world of discussion around AI. [00:21:52] But one of the things that we've been doing is kind of a variation on what people do in the cybersecurity world, which is, you know, red team experiments where you basically take one group of people who hates AI and another group who are just blind adopters. And I mean that in the most loving way of some of my colleagues. [00:22:13] But you take those two and give them the same problem and we look at the drift between how they approach and come up with their read on that particular problem. And that's another way that you can introduce this notion of validity: did this turn out the way you expected? And it's okay if it doesn't, but you've got to understand if it doesn't. [00:22:36] Absolutely. [00:22:37] Yeah. [00:22:37] Hannah Koch: Yeah. That's been paramount for us on the user side. And then I think the vendor side is its own different conversation. I think there's a lot of noise right now. Most all vendors that we speak with or engage with have some form of an AI tool that they have rolled out, are rolling out, and I'm seeing not that much conversation around integrated operational solutions for AI. So rather than having a layer of ten disconnected AI tools that are creating more complexity than value, what's interesting to me for the future is how large language models can become agentic within the organization and then work across systems and alongside our existing tech stack, rather than trying to figure out how to get, you know, five different bots to talk to each other. [00:23:31] Joe Walker: I think the way I'd characterize that, Hannah, is we're we're looking for, you know, an intelligence layer. For a long time, we had this three -layer model of, you know, the data layer, the business logic layer, and the presentation layer. And we kind of look at it as this is the intelligence layer that can unify dissimilar platforms. But we've got to make sure that it's interconnecting and making the right, you know, the right kind of decisions, the right kind of connections between systems as well as within systems. [00:24:04] Hannah Koch: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. [00:24:07] Matt Sonnen: Well, as we talk about the implementation of technology, the implementation of AI, I love both of your thoughts on how to smartly implement AI. [00:24:16] All of this leads us into the topic of change management. So, Joe, once you've made a technology decision, how do you go about getting buy-in from the rest of the firm? How do you ensure adoption of whatever tech tool that you're trying to implement? [00:24:30] Joe Walker: I'll freely confess to a misspent youth of making decisions and forcing adoption in a variety of ways. And, as Hannah said at the beginning of the call, I have some tenure, which means I'm getting old. [00:24:47] Hannah Koch: That is not - was not my intent. [00:24:50] Joe Walker: No, it's all good. But I do remember, you know, kind of riding in as the change agent and being - you know, as an external consultant, a lot of times you're deliberately used that way. And that's okay, but it's not always the most effective way to win adoption. And so I kind of look at it as: my job is never to make a platform decision or technology decision and then present it. My job is actually to co-design with our users and involve them in that process very early on, and help people understand throughout the organization, whether it's our CRSs who have a lot of day-to-day interaction with clients or the portfolio managers, advisors, financial planners, who tend to work on discreet problems, for lack of a better term. It's this idea of, you know, what's your lane and how do we facilitate it? And this system or this solution that we're working on that we have yet to select is likely to make your lane better. [00:25:56] However, I have to sometimes admit that somebody's lane might get a little more complicated for a while, and that's part of the - not no surprises - as few surprises as possible. So, like, bring people into that process early, make them co-designers, help them avoid some of the surprises, and start developing what will ultimately become your SLAs, your service level agreements, as part of that whole process. [00:26:26] And that way people can understand that you're willing to be held accountable for what you're doing. But they have to be too. They can't say, well, I don't know where this came from, because they do know where it came from. They've been a part of it in one way or another. [00:26:41] Matt Sonnen: And Hannah, what change management tactics can you share with us? What has worked for you in the past when you're trying to get the firm to adopt a new process or a new technology? [00:26:51] Hannah Koch: Yeah. I think for us and for change to stick, it has to be tied to a real pain point. Otherwise, they're hearing, you know, oh, operational efficiency. How is this making my day better? I don't care about operational efficiency. I want to know that I can, you know, go take my lunch break, whatever that might be. [00:27:11] So for us, it, it's really tying back to the person, the individual. And I think to do that, we often try to bring new projects up early and through that we focus on finding champions, not just managers, sort of pushing down these ideas. I think by circulating new projects, new solutions early, we see who gets excited and that sort of naturally helps drive adoption and change management. [00:27:39] The best thing that can ever happen to me, and it's happened recently, is someone who is very adverse to technology will come into my office and say, have you heard about this thing? And then I know, okay, great. Like, I - it's usually something that has been on my mind. One of them we can talk about is AI note takers, how to implement those well, and I had an individual at the firm who truly is so anti-technology that said, you know, my client's pushing for AI note taking. What do you think? And I - it's like, you're my champion I will be using. Going to be the one that is going to help drive this forward. So I'm really excited about that one. [00:28:20] I think another thing is: training really matters. You know, people learn best when the tool is embedded into their real workflows, not abstract demos. So we'll often do working sessions with end users, open office hours when we go live with a new technology so that people can really get their feet under them. And we see so much more adoption there. If they feel like they own the tool, have had feedback in the tool, we're able to see that adoption just skyrocket. [00:28:55] Joe Walker: Yeah, definitely a thumbs up to that one, Hannah. We rolled out this year a new tax-aware rebalancing platform and it was a real shift for people who hadn't done portfolio construction with those types of tools. And we literally called the week of Go Live hypercare. And we had, you know, we had a Teams chat open so everybody could see it. And you could literally go into it and say, you know, I'm trying to optimize these portfolios and, you know, and here's the issue I'm running into. And somebody from the vendor would jump in - usually in under five minutes, because they'd see the notification - and they'd respond to that and other people could chime in. [00:29:41] And we just kind of let people know that we were really dialed into how busy they were and how disconcerting it can be to use a new tool when you're trying to get work done. So that whole notion of creating a training environment that's highly supportive and the words matter - you know, calling it hypercare, people actually commented on that. And the approach that we took, because it was very, very visible, how focused we were. [00:30:08] Hannah Koch: Yeah, and I think your comment on having a Teams chat, just in general, you know, I think since COVID, Teams has really changed the game when it comes to change management; it makes that visibility so much more present. If you're leveraging it well, you can see the engagement in real time. People are giving a thumbs up. You can see that people are understanding, you know, that their concerns are going somewhere. They're being viewed. They have an outlet. They can read other questions and be proactive. It's been a really great tool for change management. [00:30:44] Joe Walker: It's also a phenomenal knowledge base for some of the agents that we put together, so yeah, that helps too. [00:30:51] Matt Sonnen: Well, let me throw out another tech question. Hannah, we'll go to you first. As you're building out Altair's tech stack, are you focusing on an all-in-one platform strategy, or are you following more of a best-of-breed approach? [00:31:06] Hannah Koch: Yeah. This question has been, I think, the cornerstone of my career though thus far. For me, it is very much best-of-breed. I mentioned earlier on that Altair built much of our tech stack and it worked phenomenally for decades. We're now sort of entering this world of enhancement, where we want to make sure that we can take the components that we built and love and think our clients really love and you know, take it into the next phase as we continue to grow out our systems. [00:31:41] So for me it's really leaning best-of-breed, but with guardrails. For us, integration and data flow matter more than any logo. We're really intentional about owning our data. So any system that we bring on has to earn its place in the ecosystem and we're cleanly with how we operate. So I think for us it's best-of-breed, but with caveats of, you know, does best-of-breed mean best for Altair? [00:32:11] Matt Sonnen: Yeah. Great. Well, Joe, what are your thoughts around the technology landscape for RIAs and the best approach for building BFS's tech platform? [00:32:21] Joe Walker: Well, I think we're very much in the best-of-breed, but adding some refinement to that thought process. So, you know, a friend of mine used to say: best execution is not fastest to market or cheapest price. There's a lot of dimensions of best-of-breed that you try and take into account. So, I found myself making platform choices that are kind of this blend of best-of-breed, but also I'm willing to accept something that maybe is, you know, if I was scoring something, it's a nine as opposed to a nine five or an eight instead of a nine, that kind of thing, in the name of better integration within a vendor stack. So we do a lot with SS&C (Technologies) and I don't love everything that they do, but I appreciate some of the reduction of friction that it's brought me and so that's informed some of the choices along the way. [00:33:20] I think when you start looking at what happens in the staff, I go back to my earlier statement about an intelligence layer. I feel like I've got more room to make decisions throughout the stack the more I insulate people from that stack. And what I mean is if I look at my world as, you know, kind of a combination - and I'll throw out Microsoft because it's, you know, it's what we use a lot right now, and maybe that will continue to be the case, maybe it won't - but you look at a Power BI and Copilot world where people have these really rich, interactive visual tools and prompt-based abilities to kind of field their way along the process and to ask questions and get answers. But also to get guidance in terms of drill down and navigation and so forth. That to me makes a lot of sense and it makes it less important that I buy into one vendor's vision of what the UX should be like. [00:34:24] So I think going forward, my hope is that this, you know, intelligence layer is really going to mute the impact of decisions throughout the stack and make it easier for us to make those decisions and to integrate a variety of different technologies. I'll also say that I'm very clear with any vendor that we work with that, that you were scored very - your score is heavily weighted towards how well do you play in the sandbox. [00:34:53] Matt Sonnen: Right. [00:34:54] Joe Walker: You know, proprietary closed systems and, you know, onerous - well, for Hannah, she put it really well. You know, we want to own our data. If you start trying to own our data, you're kind of out the door. [00:35:06] Matt Sonnen: Yeah. [00:35:06] Joe Walker: But, you know, to the extent that you understand that you've got one slice of the pie and there's other pieces like financial planning or like tax-aware rebalancing, et cetera, where you've got to play. Not going to, you know, we're not going to keep vendors around who don't want to do that. [00:35:23] Matt Sonnen: Yeah. Well, we talked already about the importance of people versus the technology, and I'm on record as saying that I think the fiduciary duty itself confuses us sometimes, but it's a great philosophy. It's crucial for how we serve our clients, but in my mind, the downside with our obsession to the fiduciary duty where we're constantly saying the client must come first, the client must come first, the client must come first, I think we often times - because we're so obsessed with the client must come first - we ignore our employees and our teammates. So, Hannah, what have you done at Altair Advisors to attract and retain employees and make sure they feel like they're just as, if not more important, than the clients? [00:36:07] Hannah Koch: Yeah. That's definitely a scale that you want to sort of have even. And I think between the client coming first and the employee coming first, because it's just a yin and a yang. [00:36:19] I think one important thing about Altair is that our owners are also employees, and because of that, we're deeply committed to making sure that Altair continues to be a great place to work because they're working there too. So we focus intentionally on inclusivity, flexibility, and continuous learning from everyone, from our most junior employees - continuous learning, you know, how to run Excel macros, whatever that might be - all the way up to our senior leadership. I benefited from executive coaching when I became a manager and I think that is pervasive throughout the firm and something that I don't hear - an opportunity I don't hear about everywhere - that's made me a better manager. That's made me be more conscientious of how employees are treated, the type of culture and place I want people to work. And I think that dedication has been recognized externally as well. In 2025, we were ranked number eight on Crain's Chicago Best Places to Work, which was really meaningful for us. [00:37:21] And with that, our employees are actually our largest referral network. Most of our interns come back as full-time hires, and they sort of organically help us recruit the next generation. Outside of that, I think we really just pride ourselves on hiring really brilliant people, but also really kind people. People who want to see Altair continue to succeed and set itself apart in the private wealth management space. For us, I think it's making sure that people feel respected as humans, not treated like resources, and that's when they really do their best work. And that best work ultimately shows up in how we serve clients. [00:37:58] Matt Sonnen: Great. Well, Joe, what steps has BFS taken to make your firm a destination, not just for your clients, but for your employees? [00:38:06] Joe Walker: Well, it is, you know, drives me crazy, you know, the throwaway, fadeaway shot of, you know, it's all about culture, but it is all about culture. And there's so many different facets to that. [00:38:20] So, I think showing people there's a path to success is really important, especially in a small to mid-size firm. And if you think about the size of a lot of companies in financial services, you know, under a hundred is definitely a small to mid-size firm, small size firm. So one of the things you've got to do is give people this vision of where they can go so that you're not just a stepping stone to something in their mind that might be bigger and better. You know, I want to work at Goldman Sachs. It's like, well, maybe you do, maybe you don't. You know, part of this is creating this environment where they can start to visualize their future and some of that is the proof's in the pudding. [00:39:01] So, our director of financial planning started out as, you know, an operations specialist. A number of our employees who are now, you know, heading into portfolio management and senior research roles started out as interns. And I think that, you know, that shows people you're serious about promoting from within and developing talent and so forth. [00:39:25] I think the other thing is creating this environment. Back to the fiduciary responsibility. I had this conversation - actually, Matt, I think it was not long after, right around the time when we met with very successful, actually second generation, this person's father started the original firm, and he was talking about growth and, you know, and how his people, how you would get and keep really great people. And he was having some growing pains. And one of the things I talked about was, you know, you need to create an environment that accepts failure. And he was one of these zero defect guys and I thought, you know, he kind of changed shades, as we're sitting there together and, you know, nothing could've disturbed him more. [00:40:15] And I was like, this is not chaos in the streets. This is, you know, think about this as your production environment is zero defect, and there's zero shame in your R&D, your experimental area. You have to create zones in your organization where people can experiment and get better without fear of retribution or failure or damaging a client or hurting the company financially or reputationally. [00:40:44] So I think that's the other part of it - is creating this kind of R&D zone. And we talk about sandboxes in technology, but creating a sandbox where people can develop themselves and their skills and workflows and make changes or propose changes that may not work out, at least the first time and maybe even the second time. But ultimately, if they're well conceived, they'll see the light of day and they'll make the organization a more vibrant, growing, changing, successful place. [00:41:17] Matt Sonnen: I love it. Well, Hannah and Joe, I, I can't thank you enough for being here today. It's a holiday week, no less. We're recording this in between Christmas and New Year's. [00:41:26] Your thoughtful responses to all of these questions - I know that our listeners are dealing with all of these topics on a daily basis, and I know I've learned a lot from both of you today, so thank you so much for being here, both of you. [00:41:38] Joe Walker: Absolutely. It was a pleasure. It was great getting a chance to talk about some of this stuff. [00:41:41] Hannah Koch: Thank you so much, Matt, and thanks Joe. This has been great. [00:41:45] Matt Sonnen: Well, that is a wrap on Episode 82. We will talk to you all soon. © Coldstream. All rights reserved. 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