Not Your Average Financial Planners
Curious about how you can better invest in yourself and your business? Looking for a new way to think about your money?
Recently, our CEO sat down with Phillip Ramsey and Bryan Dewhurst. They are financial planners who provide clients with information beyond retirement planning by helping them define their goals, implement plans, and create wealth. In this blog, Hollywood Branded learns about financial planning from the expertise of Phillip Ramsey and Bryan Dewhurst, the cofounders of Uncommon Wealth Partners.
A Little More About Guests
Phillip and Bryan are the co-founders of Uncommon Wealth Partners. They're financial planners that think very differently about money and provide clients with information beyond retirement planning by helping them define goals, implement plans, create wealth and ultimately, secure that highly sought commodity of freedom of time by closely working with their clients to discover what they actually want their money to do for them.
Interview Transcript Highlights
Question: Since there's two of you, whichever wants to go first... How did y'all come up and start this business together? How do you know each other and how did you become not just friends, but business partners?
Bryan: We met through church. We were actually trying to just have breakfast with a bunch of entrepreneurs and figure things out, different types of investments. That's actually how we met. I try to tell stories and I leave out probably too many facts, but I was in the business, Phillip was in the business. We had talked about him coming to work where I was at, but I really wasn't in a position to stake him or put food on the table, so to speak. He went with a different company. About five or six months later, we were at coffee and we got through the obligatory like, "Oh yeah, everything's great." It's like, "I'm on monster.com." And I was like, "So am I. I think we could do this together better because we're calling on a lot of the same people."
Phillip's obviously the personable one, the people person, if you've met both or spent time with both of us. I'm the numbers guy. It was a really good team. That's what we decided to do and we've been together ever since. You have anything to add there?
Phillip: I would say that financial advising, financial services, I've never met somebody that I actually want to talk to. They always want to take my money from me and ultimately keep me in the position that I was in because I have no money to actually do something different. When I got into this industry, I thought, "There's got to be a better way." The company that I was with was only teaching me how to sit down with my family and friends, try to ask them what they're saving a month, kill one of them off, make them cry, and sell them life insurance. And I was like, "There's got to be a better way." That's when Bryan and I met. The first time we met was that investment club. I remember thinking that Bryan inherently thought differently and quickly about money.
That really stood out to me. He and I had coffee and the rest was history. I said, "You teach me the ways that how to help people make money, and then together we'll do this together." It's a powerful thing having a partnership, because Bryan and I both have very different personalities. All of our clients get to have the benefit of both of us looking at it in a different way. Now, we get to sit down with people and ask them really what's important to them. It's not just trying to amass as much money as you possibly can get, at the end of the day, well, what are you going to do with the money once you get there?
It's really what we call your passion. Trying to get you to those ends and those means, I would say that we are like your worthy advisor to the unadvisable, where we really try to help people start a business or invest in something that they've always wanted to invest in and then help them make that more efficient to make them more money. Because inherently, you know who you are and your personality, and that's a way better investment than putting your money in the market and hoping it goes up or down.
Together, we've built this Uncommon Wealth Partners, and we get to help people every day in that means. I've never looked back, and can't tell you how many times people have cried in front of us because we're just finally unlocking what their true value is. Long answer to a very short question, but that's it.
Question: When working with us, at least, you make it really easy to break down those barriers and look at it from less of a, "Wow, what did you do? You are really not that smart," to, "Okay, well, what can we do with this and how can we move forward where you can actually amass more benefits from your dollars?"
Phillip: Absolutely. It's just, what are the obstacles in front of us? We all have those. There's some shame that I think comes with a lot of financial places of like, "I wish I was at a different place." It doesn't really help you gain traction where you want to go. Let's just talk about it, it doesn't matter what it is, let's just put it down on a piece of paper. What we've found is, when people start monetizing what they really want, it gets tangible to them. "Wait a second, you're telling me it's going to cost this, this, and that, and my risks are this, that, and the other? I'm okay with it." I would say doing that with a husband and wife or a partnership, a team, is really powerful because then each person has a safe place to talk about their fears and talk about what is scary to them or whatever they have to talk about.
Having a safe place to really digest what's going on and what their plan is to move forward, it's so encouraging to get people unified, shoulder to shoulder is what we call it, going towards the same goal. When you get there, it doesn't matter what the history was, we're going to get there. It's a really fun place to be in. Bryan does a great job, and I always tell people. The more information you can give Bryan, the better your plan will be, because we can just make it more customized. "Hey, this is what's happening. This is the assets that you have to work with. Maybe if we look at these assets in a different way, maybe it'll help you achieve your goals way faster than you ever even dreamed."
Thinking about it in an uncommon way is powerful because just a lot of advisors are just trying to think of, "How much assets do I have to manage for you?" Instead of like, "No, no, no, what if we took that asset and used it to further your goals right now?" Super encouraging and beneficial.
Question: How do you start the conversation? I know how we started conversations, but how do you start working with a client? What is the first thing? Is it you give them this financial dashboard that you've built together, that Bryan is so good at doing, or are there certain questions? How do you dig in and figure out where someone's at?
Bryan: I think obviously that starts with Phillip, who does a great job building trust with people and getting them to open up and talk about what they really want in life. A lot of the things that people share with us, or I would typically say one to three year things when you look at traditional financial planning, it seems like 20, 30-year type things, and so there's an incongruence there for a lot of people. A lot of our clients share that sentiment of like, "This is so refreshing because we get to talk about what we actually want to do right now, not 20, 30 years from now."
I think post COVID, that's even more so on the forefront right now because we've all got a glimpse of how good we've maybe had it and how short life can be. I think it's important to have goals and feel like you're moving towards those goals in the short term. If we can do that, things over the long term will take care of itself with the correct planning. I hope that answers your question.
Phillip: Yeah. I would say the first thing we do is just do a 15-minute consultation or just like a get-to-know-you meeting, as we say. We do know that our philosophy is a little different, and sometimes people just aren't there yet. I'll say that our favorite clients to work with are the clients that know what they want and have a timeline of when they want it, because now they've just defined their success. Now I feel like I'm ready to enter in with them, versus the family or the individual who's like, "I don't really know what I want." Well, we're not going to be a good fit, because the last thing I want to do is try to put your money into an investment, even a retirement account, that's going to put your money in prison. I feel like that's the worst decision to make when somebody's like, "I don't know what I want."
Our first consultation is like, "Hey, are we a good fit?" It really doesn't have a lot to do with money, it's more about getting people excited again, getting people to think like they're in high school where they think that their life is going to be roses and sunshine and something that they're really good at. That's our first call, "Hey, is this a good fit? Do you know what you want moving forward?" Then we talked through like, "Okay, this is how we work with individuals and how we can walk side by side with you moving forward." That's the way we start with them.
Question: I have a feeling that most of the people that you're working with tend to be a little older, because that's when you're all of a sudden like, "Hmm, maybe I really don't know what I'm doing and I could actually use some advice." What's the optimal age that someone should be coming to you guys?
Phillip: Great question. As soon as you know what you want. As soon as you know what you want and you're ready to do whatever it takes to get there. And you're ready to look at your situation in a different perspective. We do have a lot of people, all ages that come to us... At first, it's just talking through, then all of a sudden in the meeting, they're like, "You want to know what I really want?" And we're all ears. Now we're talking.
That's when we can really start seeing people start getting excited and start talking excited and move faster and they blah, blah, blah. A lot of times, that meeting will go longer than 15 minutes. At the end I'll ask them like, "Hey, how long have you been meeting?" A lot of times they'll be like, "I don't know, like 10 minutes." No, it's been 45, because you're finally excited about what you're talking about. That to me is super encouraging no matter what age you are. You can be 15, you can be 60, you can be 75, 80. I don't care. Let's get you on this excitement motivated trajectory where you and the loved ones around you are like ready to rock.
Question: When you're working through with people, you come up with lots of different ways that they can plan their future. What are some of the more innovative options that you bring to the table that are not your traditional Roth IRA?
Bryan: I think the thing that we try to highlight in the book and podcast, not to shamelessly plug, but it's really just the seven sources of residual income of really trying to dial down at the core, that everything pretty much falls underneath one of those seven. We don't tell people you need to do all seven, by any means. Invariably, the people that we meet with, they see a point across a bridge that they want to get to. It's pretty clear to them, they see it, they can touch it, they can taste it. They just can't get over there for whatever reason. Something's blocking them.
We just try to help them unlock that path of, what's stopping you from getting over there? Most of the time, it's like, "I want to do something off the beaten path, it's outside of like stocks and bonds," because you can do that so easily now. It's, "I want to start a business" or "I want to do real estate." The buzzword is passive income or residual income. We're framing it more as like passion income. How do I monetize what I'm good at and what I like to do? They don't teach you that in school. That's what I'd say is what we deal with the most, is, how do we organize your capital to you, so to speak, and take that leap of faith so that you see your parachute open or your wings spread open.
I love that talk by, I think it's Steve Harvey, where he's between taping the shows, of like, "You've got to jump." It's one of my favorite videos on YouTube. But a lot of times, people have that thing and we're just helping them as their copilot flush that out and then, how do you do it? How did you take the next steps?
Check Out The Podcast!
Philip and Bryan have so much great information from their experience with financial planning. Check out the podcast below to learn more about how to drive your business from their advice and expertise!
Every week we have a marketing professional on our show to share their tips, tricks and lessons learned from their professional experience. Check out some of our other podcast blogs from earlier this year:
Every week we release a new podcast featuring guest's with so much knowledge about marketing, you don't want to miss one! How can you make sure you don't miss an episode? Click below to subscribe!
