Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [00:58]
Hi everyone, welcome back to Off the Wall. I’m Jessica Gibbs and I’m here with my co-host, Dave Armstrong. Hey, Dave.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [01:04]
Hey there, great to see you again. Love doing the pod.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [01:06]
Yeah, so we have an amazing guest today, Marla Sofer. Marla is the founder and CEO of Knomee, which is a digital platform aimed at helping people gain confidence in their financial future. She has a background in various leadership roles in financial services and tech companies, including BlackRock, Microsoft, JP Morgan some big names on her resume. But Marla started Knomee to help people articulate their values and their money goals and to make sure that their money aligns with their values. Feels like such a novel concept in financial services to be talking about that, but it’s such an important one, so she felt that there was something missing for people who want their money to have meaning and, more importantly, we’re not being heard or served by advisors who adhere to that more traditional financial services model. Marla is also very active on LinkedIn, which is something we’ll talk about in this episode. She reaches over 13,000 followers, so we’ll kind of prod her brain about that at the end of the episode. But to start, welcome Marla to the podcast.
Marla Sofer [02:19]
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the introduction. I think I need to have a recording of that and use it.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [02:26]
That was phenomenal, thank you. High praise for someone who is a guest on a lot of podcasts. So yeah, and with 13,000 followers.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [02:33]
That’s. That’s awesome. So hopefully we get 10% of them following us. We’ll double our followers.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [02:38]
So, I hope so, right? So, as I said, we have a great conversation planned with you, Marla. We’re going to be digging into your journey and what drove you to start Knomee later in the episode. But I do want to start with your personal wealth advice experience, Marla, if you’ll let me, because you made a post on LinkedIn, which we’ll link to in the show notes, where you talk about how, despite you and your husband’s backgrounds in wealth and asset management, you chose to hire an advisor to help you guys personally. So, I’m kind of curious what led you guys to that decision and why do you think that it was beneficial versus, you know, going the do it yourself route and managing your own wealth yourself?
Marla Sofer [03:28]
Route in managing your own wealth yourself. Yeah, so I’ll caveat by saying it was not a quick decision and not an easy one. It took us multiple years. I would say that there’s really three components to why did we personally choose to use an advisor. The first, and you’re right, both of us have been licensed advisors. We have advised clients, we know how to manage portfolios. Sausage is made.
Marela Sofer [03:49]
But at the same time, I and I think my husband as well, but I’ll get to this in number two, I think recognize that the facts matter. The facts are that when you work with a financial advisor, you are more likely to stay on track. It doesn’t matter how qualified and how educated and how licensed you are. You’re still a human and because you’re a human, you might really benefit from that one level removed from the trigger, because you make irrational decisions, and everyone has an irrational relationship with money. And so, to me, that was blatantly obvious. It was supported in all the research, and I didn’t want to fight. Fight the facts.
Marla Sofer [04:45]
I think the number two most important one was I recognized our money beliefs were so different and in order for us to come together and make decisions, we had massive hurdles to overcome and a lot of times that hurdle stopped us from taking action at all, which in and of itself was a huge, very harmful decision. And so having somebody come in and recognize, okay, you’re coming from different money beliefs in different places, but here’s what we’re going to do and find compromise was really, really important. And I would say the third one is I became a business owner, and when you become a business owner, there’s a whole lot that I knew about what I don’t know as it relates to tax optimization and vehicles, to put which assets and which vehicles and which types of, I think, things I needed to consider in order to optimize portfolio. Now that I have this whole new menu at my disposal around tax optimization as a business owner. So, those were kind of my three major drivers.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [05:48]
It’s interesting because no one is their own lawyer in court, right, no matter how great of a lawyer they are, and no doctor is their own doctor. They have another doctor too. So, when I hear you say that you knew a lot about the industry, but you still felt like you needed some counterpoint or different perspectives on things, that was immediately what came to mind. For me was were those two professions as well.
Marla Sofer [06:11]
Yeah, I think that makes sense. I think people try, but they don’t necessarily do a good job. I think sometimes you have people who are like oh yeah, I’ll just represent myself in court. I have a family who’s a doctor and he has quite abominable health habits, and so you might be an expert. It doesn’t mean you’re making the right choices for yourself.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [06:30]
Well, you said that at Knomee. You have this phrase that you often say quote. It depends on what question end quote. If you’re the type of person who wants your money to have meaning, walk us through, step by step, exactly how to define what is meaningful to you not necessarily everyone else.
Marla Sofer [06:52]
Yeah, let me take a step back on the quote as well. It needs a little bit more context. So I think the question that I think people ask themselves and we’ve done a ton of research and we recognize everyone has this question on their mind, especially when they come into capital, when they’re going through a transition and they’re like great, now, what do I do with my money? So it doesn’t matter who you are, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. The answer to that question what do I do with my money is always the exact same, and the answer is it depends always. And so that’s kind of the context with which people are struggling. They have a major question. They don’t know how to answer it. How do you help them? And so the first thing you do to help them is to say chill, relax, just understand that nobody has a one size fits all answer, and I think good advice recognizes that there’s no one size fits all answer. It depends. It depends on so many pieces of context about you and your money. So, when you think about values and you think about having your second part of your question, like when you align wealth with meaning and how do you get there, how do you understand meaning fingers, and you know the answer to that question. There is a process and the process is really helping somebody introspect, helping somebody go inside and do the self-discovery to understand what really matters to me, what brings me joy, what gives me fulfillment when I think about how I want to spend my life, how I want to spend maybe the next five years, my future, what kinds of causes matter to me, what kind of contributions to my kids? If I’ve got kids, how do I want to support them in their lives? What does being a model to them look like? There’s so many different ways to pull on the thread to understand what are your values, because a lot of times people answer these questions with very abstract terms. My value is security. My value is security. My value is freedom. My value is independence Great, all of those are fantastic, but I think a good advisor and in order to align your money with your value, you have to say more. I don’t know if you guys listen to Esther Perel. I love it how she always says say more. And she’s not in the money business, she is in the relationship business, but I think just the ability to be a very active listener and help somebody unpack that. Help somebody say what do you mean when you say independence? Because two different people are going to have very different answers 10 different people, very different answers.
Marla Sofer [09:20]
When you say independence and you say you don’t want to outlive your money, fine, those are table stakes. That’s kind of very generic and so if you want to go deeper into understanding what do you want to do with that money? When you say don’t want to outlive your money, let’s talk a little bit about how you want to live your life. Do you value travel? If you value travel, tell me more about that travel. Are you planning on taking an RV and going on a road trip? Are you planning on going up to your local lake? Are you going to go and spend three months at a time in Europe and living in five-star hotels and fine dining? They’re very, very different, not only with the respect to the expense and how you have to support that budget, but also with respect to understanding. What do they mean when they say they have these values. What is it that you can do to help them align their money with those values?
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [10:16]
It’s really interesting to hear you say that, because I think one of the things that we’ve found at Monument that’s common among our clients is that they’ve spent decades working towards I’ll call it self-actualization the state where their work, their talent, their commitments, they’ve freed them to live purposely and freely. And so, at Monument we spend a lot of time talking with our clients about the purpose of their wealth and in fact we actually go deep on that in conjunction with their goals. You know purpose and goals together, even before someone even becomes a client, because purpose is just so fundamental to how we give advice at Monument. We love the phrase at Monument that you know, everything revolves at Monument. Everything for us revolves around the um, the question what’s the money for? That’s our, our kind of it depends on what you know, your, your take.
Jessice Gibbs, CFP® [11:13]
So, you know we see ourselves as the client’s accountability partner kind of back to what you were saying before as well just to help ensure that they’re making decisions and they’re taking actions that align with that purpose and their long-term wealth goal. Like, for example, if someone is getting really hung up on performance, we like to tie it back to okay, but do you actually need to take on that risk Because your plan shows that you don’t need to take on that risk and you’ve told us you don’t want to leave a massive inheritance to your kids. Like you don’t need to take on that added risk in your investments because you already can accomplish all your goals and your purpose is to enjoy that money with your kids now, not leave a massive inheritance to your heirs.
Marla Sofer [12:01]
I was just going to reflect back on something you said and ask if there might be a slight tweak or nuance. So you referenced self-actualization and you said your clients kind of have gotten to this point and I would actually question whether have they come to self-actualization or have they come to vocational independence, that they’re now at a point where they have enough capital that they can support their expenses and their lifestyle, you know, for the rest of their lives and for whatever they need. But I would say self-actualization is bigger and it’s a higher level purpose. It’s a lot like you self-actualization, you know, if you look at you know the Maslow hierarchy and everything else. It’s this never-ending pursuit and it demands not only that hey, I’ve got enough money to support myself, so I’ve actualized.
Marla Sofer [12:49]
No, it is very intrinsically linked with the concept of purpose and impact. So not only have you clarified your purpose, but you’re having the impact you’d like to have. You’ve actualized. You know everything that you’ve intended to do on this planet you’re now doing. And so I feel like at some, at some point, like humans are never actually there, they’re always there’s always learning and this drive for impact. It’s what keeps us alive and engaged. And then clarifying, like on whom? Who do you want to have that impact on, and how do you want to have the impact? How do you want that impact to show up in life?
Marla Sofer [13:26]
The other thing I really love that you said, and I think this is definitely one of the signs of a fantastic wealth manager is that you see yourself as a client’s accountability partner, which I think the next level of definition of that is the client’s the driver. The client, it’s their money, and what you are is you are their ice to their maverick right. You’re the navigator You’re trying to help them understand. Okay, let me understand where you’re going so that I can help you get there, so I can be your partner in achieving that purpose and that actualization in the way that you deem to be in line with your definition.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [14:09]
Right, yeah, Something like. If I’m just being frank, something we’ve talked about here at Monument lately is what’s common amongst how we like to work with our clients is like we don’t want our clients necessarily to care about one thing. We just want them to care about something, necessarily to care about one thing. We just want them to care about something that’s just, you know, like whatever that is to you, whether that is, you know, your home and your family, or it is charitable giving, or it is, you know, like all these sorts of things that you could expand on starting a business, whatever it is like, we just want you to care about something, have some intention and purpose that drives you to want to make an impact. I love that word that you used.
Marla Sofer [14:49]
Yeah, and I think allow them to change. They’re humans, humans of shape, and all the time they are uh, you know, this week I’m super into, you know, taking plastics out of the oceans and next week I’m like you know, I just want to kind of hang at home and uh and support my, my kids as they’re going off to college or buying their first house or whatever it is.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [15:07]
Yeah, that that leads me to think of a follow-up question here, and I I spoiler alert I know the answer, but I want to hear you say it.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [15:14]
So, it’s sort of a rhetorical question, but it okay, and I’ll give you an example.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [15:19]
If I were to go into a personal trainer and say I want to lose 10 pounds, right, so that’s my stated goal, losing 10 pounds Well, I would expect that the personal trainer would say well, hang on a second. Are you trying to lose 10 pounds because your doctor says you’re overweight and you’re unhealthy, or do you just want to look better? Or do you do you just think you should lose 10 pounds because that, will you know, increase your lifestyle, or you know your ability, or maybe, hey, 10 pounds isn’t enough, you need to lose 50, which is probably what my personal trainer would say if I walked in the door. But, um, so it. The follow-up question is you know, should people be thinking about purpose and goals before they ever even walk into an advisor? Because they may think they know what the goal is, but maybe there are some second and third level thoughts to that goal that they should be considering before they walk into an advisor and hopefully. If they haven’t, the advisor would suss those things out.
Marla Sofer [16:24]
Yeah, I think it’s a lot to ask and I feel like, as an advisor, to assume that somebody should, which is a big word, because people come to advisor because they have a problem, they have something that they need help with, and so I think it would.
Marla Sofer [16:42]
And not only do they have a problem, they need to have something they have help with. There’s already so much shame and stigma attached to hey, I need help with my money, I am coming to you because I want you to help me, and so I think the word should is something I might take issue with, because I feel like they’re coming to you for help. But I do feel take issue with, because I feel like they’re coming to you for help. But I do feel that an advisor has a duty to say okay, there’s a process that you go through that I can help you go through, which is just let’s reflect on your own whys, like whys not W-I-Z-E-S-E, w-h-y your whys as to why are you coming to me? What is the help that you need? What does good look like I?
Marla Sofer [17:29]
think good advice is to ask that question what does good look like when I am on all cylinders getting you exactly what you want? How does that manifest in the way you are living your life? Not only in the way you’re living your life in the way that you are feeling about your money. What is it that you are feeling about your money, call it one year in, when we’re churning. It’s not a great word, but we are kind of going through all of the right steps to get you where you want to go. Your emotional experience is what? What are you feeling? And so, when you have that answer and you can reflect back to them, okay, you are feeling great. Now you can actually ask them an X question and ask them to express because I’m feeling this way, because X and so that I think really eeks out of them. What is the narrative behind the why, what is it that you got me to do tactically and transactionally that made you feel a certain way, and how did that show up and give me more detail, how did that actually come to life in the because? Because I am now blank and because I am now, you can keep going on this like path until you get to the level of detail you’re looking for, but I think a lot of people don’t have information.
Marla Sofer [18:58]
I’ve done now we’ve probably interviewed 2000 people, some digitally, some directly, and we ask a lot of people what are your goals? The most common answer is I don’t know. The second most common answer more money. So those two common answers are, I think, a reflection back on. Society doesn’t actually give us the tools to answer what are our goals? It’s much easier for us to do that as it relates to weight loss or as it relates to something where we’re kind of trained about having goals and recognizing the goals and the reasons behind the goals.
Marla Sofer [19:35]
But then money. So, money I think it’s so fraught with decades, I would even say generations of the industry has been conditioned to sell people products, not to solve their problems. You can’t expect a client to all of a sudden flip around 180 degrees and be like oh wait, now you want to solve my problem, you’re curious about my problem. I haven’t even thought about my problem, and so I think it requires a little bit more compassion and empathy and work. And that’s where Knomee comes in is how do we help them get to that self-discovery so they can communicate what their purpose is and their goals, and then you can align together. Like you said, be an accountability partner to help them achieve that, Marla?
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [20:26]
what would you say is the biggest challenge that people face when they’re transitioning from managing money for survival to managing it for purpose and fulfillment?
Marla Sofer [20:38]
So, I think that it is an entire kind of unlearning, and I think that’s now become really trendy in a lot of academia the importance of taking a step back and unlearning, and I think that’s now become really trendy in a lot of academia the importance of taking a step back and unlearning everything you’ve ever been taught. It’s extremely challenging and incredibly important. And when we think about that persona, that persona who is vocationally independent and they might not need to continue to focus on accumulation and whether that’s accumulation because I have to keep, you know, working, you know 12 hour days, or because I need to keep putting my, my capital at risk because I just want to focus on accumulation to somebody who is now at a point of independence and now can totally redefine for themselves Wait a second, what is this all for? And I think for a point of independence and now can totally redefine for themselves wait a second, what is this all for? And I think for a lot of people that happens in midlife, kind of naturally, where we realize, oh, I’m really not having fun in this job.
Marla Sofer [21:40]
Or, wait a second, I’ve really been spending all of my time and energy on something, whether it’s a job or otherwise, and it’s not really tapping that, that thing for me that is making me feel like I’m coming alive, and so some people have this realization and opening and that’s kind of the time when I think they need the most help. I’m here, I’m listening to you, I’m helping you. What does this transition feel like for you? What are you now focused on? I think there’s a lot, a lot of context. That’s really critical. If somebody was raised I recently interviewed somebody who was raised poor, like by any definition, like hungry, hungry in a different country, struggled to kind of barter for food and support her family, and then she came to America.
Marla Sofer [22:31]
She ended up getting a PhD, got into these great programs, got a great job. She now is worth $45 million more or less, but so many of her money beliefs are stuck in that mindset of I need to make sure that I am protected, because I know what it felt like. I know what it felt like to have nothing and I don’t want to go back there. And yeah, I think part of an advisor’s role is to help them feel comfortable. You’re never going back there Like there’s no way. Like you said, you can’t spend enough to ever go back there.
Marla Sofer [23:06]
Your purpose now, your big job, is to think about how do you want this money to show up in a way that serves you and your values and your sense of purpose. You are now one of the lucky individuals in the world that can take some time and think about how do you want that money to act as an expression of your identity in the world. Your money. It goes beyond what you can do with your voice or your time. It actually can have the power that you want to have, even when you’re not in the room. So that is how I think the conversation can evolve to say well, what does that look like? How can your money become your voice?
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [23:50]
How can your money become your voice? How can your money become your voice? I love that, yeah, Cause I can’t tell you how many Monument clients I’ve talked to who come from humble beginnings started a business. The business just happened to do extremely well because of, you know, hard work, timing, luck, any sort of reasons, and they now have all this money from a business sale and they’re like I never even wildest dreams imagined I would be in this position and what to do with it and how to pass it on successfully and how to have impact during your life. You know, it’s just. These are questions that they never even thought were possible, let alone right in front of them.
Marla Sofer, [24:32]
And I also think it’s important to recognize that that lifestyle might have brought them purpose. My grandfather. He died at 91. I think he drove himself to work the day before, even if you don’t have to work, some people want to work, that is their purpose and recognizing that, let’s say they sold their business and they can’t go back because work has now been redefined, and they don’t want to be there anymore. So they may go through grieving, like literal grieving, and they may need to go through the same steps of grieving as somebody who has lost something that they love dearly and so recognizing that that relationship with that thing that drove purpose for them for so long is transitioning approach a transition like retirement was so much focused on like when should I start social security?
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [25:31]
And like, how do I transition to like taking money out of my portfolio and enrolling in Medicare and those sorts of things, and not nearly as much effort and emotional energy is put into what are you going to do with your time? And how are you going to, like, fill your cup in a way that your career or your business or whatever you were doing when you were working, you know, provided you some sort of intrinsic value and made you feel good about your contributions to the world? So, like, how are you going to replace that feeling and so I talk with clients a lot about that of like, what are you going to do with your time? And I don’t necessarily mean like give me an answer right now, I’m just more posing the question, and it’s something that it’s okay for you to figure out through exploration in retirement. I mean, that’s what retirement is for for you to have your own time to do what you want and explore new things.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP®[26:17]
But to just be mindful of, like, if you worked one-on-one helping someone as part of your career, how are you going to fill that same sort of need, that void for you? Fill that cup I love that phrase for you in retirement, how are you going to help someone so that you can feel good about what you’re doing and not feel this like sort of empty feeling? I think the days of people retiring and sitting on the couch and golfing and not doing anything like that’s past, like people don’t do that anymore.
Marla Sofer [26:45]
Giving them liberty to define that. For some people it might be all I want to do is golf and I want to be the best golfer in my town, and I want to win the award at my country club every year and that is awesome because that is part of their purpose. But having them really like I really love what you’re saying. It’s thinking about their money as a tool to help them do what they want with their time. They’re both so intrinsically linked, like your money and your time and your voice are your resources. That’s it You’re giving. Your money. Your time, your voice, your presence All you have as a human have impact.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [27:24] So, Marla. I am curious though do you think that DIY or do it yourself wealth management prevents you from unlocking purposeful wealth Like are there roadblocks that you might be seeing that if you worked with an advisor, they would help you see those easier.
Marla Sofer [27:41]
Um, I think it’s a. It’s a tricky question because so many people are they’re different. Does it prevent you? No, not at all. If you want to be a DIY investor focused on purpose, you know you certainly could. Nothing’s preventing you.
And I think a lot of people go into the venture capital world and become angel investors because that’s exactly what they’re looking for. They want to align their money with their purpose and it’s, I think, a part of the rise in. You know so many women, angel funds and women. You know people that have been female executives and have a lot of capital and they’re like I want to help other women not go through what I went through, and I want to help them launch companies and be more independent. So, there’s like this linkage between their history, their values and their impact and they can certainly do that alone.
Marla Sofer [28:30]
I think where an advisor really comes in and can help is where you think about you have the whole pie, let’s say your whole, all of your, all of your assets are included in this pie and you think about how do you want, how do you balance what goes in the pie? And I’ll just reflect on myself. I actually needed help where I thought. I know that there is different asset locations and this is getting a little bit geeky, for I don’t know who your listeners are but different asset locations should be optimized for different, for different products inside that, that you know that structure in order to optimize for tax or whenever I want it to be liquidated or the purpose that that money is coming together for and will be decumulating at some point in the future. So an advisor can help look at the whole pie and help make the choices to say, okay, we’re going to understand your purpose and your values, but we can help you with these things that might be just slightly around the corner from your vision. We can help you with these things that might be just slightly around the corner from your vision. We can help you see these things that just might not be familiar to you. And for all of these different reasons and there’s so many reasons that people work with advisors for me it’s because I told you why, but also because, as a business owner, you have so many things that I just know I’m not an expert on.
Marla Sofer [29:47]
If I’m an expat, if I’m going through a divorce, if I’m thinking about buying a property in another country there’s so many things that I feel like I know that there’s an implication to the way that my portfolio should be constructed, and I know it matters.
But I just need some help, even if it’s just a thought partner, to kind of talk through. How should I think through these things, help me really clearly identify the impact and then help me understand what slice of the pie gets allocated to which types of exposures, so that I’m not making a mistake, so that I’m not doing something that I shouldn’t be doing. And I think, at the end of the day, as it relates to money, most people just want to know am I okay? Am I making the right choices? Am I doing the right things for myself? And that thought partnership, to say you ago, you’ve been holding onto that money fear, let’s say, for 30, 40 years. I’m going to try to help you slowly dissolve it and recognize that fear doesn’t have to stay with you anymore. Now we can think about other things.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [31:01]
Yeah, it’s interesting because we see clients come to Monument because they have this, I’ll just call it a nagging feeling that they’re missing something in their wealth plan. Or oftentimes they’ll come to us because whoever it is that they’re currently getting financial advice from, just in their mind, isn’t going deep enough. So, what are some of the things that people should be asking their advisor? To make sure that that advisor is let’s just call it metaphorically uncovering all the rocks.
Marla Sofer [31:32]
Yeah, and I would start by saying they feel that way because they’re not, and it’s not Monument’s fault, our industry doesn’t or the other advisors’ fault yeah. It’s nobody’s fault. We as an industry were never taught or given the tools or it was never even suggested that here’s the type of information you need to be gathering. Here’s how you transition from being a product to being a solution. Here is, here is what that looks like, and so I think we’re in this kind of new, new era where wait a second that’s even possible. It is possible, and it’s not advisor’s fault. They don’t go deep enough.
Marla Sofer [32:11]
Something is missing, and that something that’s missing is, you know, and it happened to me, and I’ve got a fantastic advisor that we chose, and I also left feeling, ah, he didn’t ask me about this, he didn’t ask me about that, and, frankly, there’s always a balance. He can’t be on the phone with me for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. He’s got a job to do. He’s got to actually take as much as he was able to get what of me, what I said and start doing the transactions to help me get to where I want to go, and so I think it’s really balancing.
Marla Sofer [32:52]
So, you’re asking enough of the right information and that might not be, in fact. Again, where Nomi comes in is some of it shouldn’t be in a, in a face-to-face or on the phone conversation. It might actually be done independently by the client in their own time, when they’re kind of at home alone with their families and they have to answer the harder questions that might not come from the brain to the lips within a second. It might take them some hours, it could take them days to really think through. I don’t really know how to answer that question.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [33:23]
Yeah, and it’s also okay to have a conversation. Okay, I’m going to embarrass myself. So, when I wake up in the morning on a workday, I come down to the kitchen and I turn on the television that’s in the kitchen and it’s a Samsung smart TV. So, when you turn it on, it automatically defaults and turns on what they call Samsung TV, like a network, and for some reason I have to figure out how to change this but it’s on Bravo TV. So, when I turn my TV on right, okay, so at between eight and nine o’clock in the morning, the show on Bravo TV is millionaire matchmaker.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [33:59]
Okay, so I will see it. I don’t watch it, I promise, but out of the corner of my eye, I see it Now. The premise of the show is there’s a woman who’s a matchmaker in Los Angeles and she is obviously brokering guys and gals getting together and having dates, and so she goes through this interview process of what are you looking for? And when you were talking about that, that advisors aren’t going deep enough. I’m embarrassed to say that I learned something from the show, but I did. So, I’m just going to say it, so you know what I learned from that show was you rarely uncover what it is that everybody wants or is looking for or is trying to solve in the first conversation.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [34:39]
So, you said like, well, you know, I left the meeting, and it was like, oh, he didn’t ask me about this, or they didn’t ask me about that, and yeah, you know that stuff happens all the time. But when you have a channel of communication open between people looking for advice and people giving advice and you start to do that, what if? Or I thought about this and this, like that is all really, really important things to have happening in an advice relationship and drilling down and uncovering those rocks. It may not happen in the first conversation. We always have clients come back to us and say like well, you know, we were in your planning room, and we had this big, long conversation, we uncovered all these things and then when I went home, I thought about X, Y, Z, Right, and so you know that happens all the time. So, listeners who aren’t our clients or clients of somebody else’s, it’s not necessarily that somebody has a bad relationship, it’s just maybe there needs to be more communication.
Marla Sofer [35:31]
Can I also suggest that I love the analogy between millionaire matchmaker and advice. Here’s why, here’s why, because-.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [35:39]
You clearly know what the show is that I’m talking.
Marla Sofer [35:41]
No, I’ve actually never seen it, but that’s quite all right. But I mean, clearly, they’re, they’re matchmaking for marriage, right? And a marriage is a relationship entirely, entirely, built on trust. It is when you think about a marriage, and you think about how somebody wants to meet the person they’re going to spend the rest of their life with. I got to tell you some people have a tighter relationship with their financial advisor than they have with their spouse. And so that level of trust and getting to know you and making sure you’re going to be my advocate, you’re going to be there when I need you and understand me deep enough so that you’re making the right choices. Sometimes the financial advisor is even at a higher level. And that matchmaking process, it should be even more demanding than, potentially, the person you’re going to marry. Obviously not in all cases, but here’s the extremes. But I think that that building of trust between an individual and their advisor, I think can learn a lot from the process of matchmaking.
Marla Sofer [36:44]
And we actually learned a lot from dating apps. When you go into a dating app and because Knomee, kind of, was building our software and we were thinking in a dating app what they’re doing is trying to get to know you, but what really matters to you? So how do they do that? How do they get to know you? What are the questions they ask? That is the information the advisor needs. That’s the information that the advisor has to have to get their arms around so they can help you actually manifest those things in your life. You say you care about X. You say you like taking long walks by the beach. How come you’re not living by the beach? That’s something that’s really important to you. Let’s make a plan to get you over closer to the beach. Um, so those types of things that happen in that, you know, in a marriage relationship are extremely critical to an advisor relationship.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [37:33]
Can you talk a little bit more about your journey and what drove you to start Knomee? About your journey and what drove you to start Knomee?
Marla Sofer [37:39]
Yeah, sure, um. So, uh, forever ago, I um studied peace and conflict resolution. I wanted to be a diplomat. I lived overseas. I learned a lot about mediation, negotiation, communication, uh. I then had a brief job in nonprofit where I did fundraising, um. And then I worked a little bit on Wall Street at a telecom company where I learned SQL, query writing and kind of coding on Wall Street.
Marla Sofer [38:06]
And then I started to get my MBA and I got this job at a private bank and at this private bank this is all kind of within, I would say, chapter one of my career, kind of figuring yourself out and all of those things. So, I worked at this private bank, became a licensed advisor. My clients were Latin American clients, and it was a pretty small. We called it a second-floor bank. It wasn’t the ground level bank, you know, it wasn’t a retail bank. But we did everything that client needed. We got to know their families, we got to know their businesses and their suppliers. We helped them with cash transactions when family members died. We helped with any type of reporting, with credit. It was just a really great soup to nuts perspective on what can a bank do for a person, and so I learned a lot about how the financial industry interacts with high-net-worth individuals.
Marla Sofer[39:02]
From there, I got a job at JP Morgan, and I worked in the guts of asset management in global custody. So, this is security servicing. This is what happens when trades settle. What does trade settlement even mean? What is fund accounting all about? How are companies managed as securities, and what does that look like in the wrapper of whatever portfolio it’s in, whether it is a mutual fund or a pension fund or a sovereign wealth fund? And so, I got very deep into the operations of investing. So, I started in New York. I was relocated here to the Bay Area in 2007. I was responsible for a team that covered service for all West Coast asset managers. We covered 150 asset managers and some very large wealth who had a direct relationship with the custodian. And then, from JP Morgan, I moved to BlackRock, and this was right. After BlackRock bought BGI. It was a behemoth company that became even bigger, and they wanted strategic oversight of who should we work with, why should we work with them, how much should we pay them, who’s best at what, and so, really thinking across all of BlackRock’s asset classes and regions of the world, it was a very strategic role with them. How much should we pay them? Who’s best at what? And so, really thinking across all of BlackRock’s asset classes and regions of the world, it was a very strategic role.
And then, from BlackRock, I got very involved in nonprofit work and wanted more impact in my life and wanted the financial industry to. Wanted to be a part of the financial industry being better for its clients, and so that led me to get into fintech. So since 2015, I’ve been in fintech. I’ve run partnerships at four different fintech companies I’m sure all of them are familiar to your audience and then I also spent two years at Microsoft really thinking through what can tech do to help the financial industry come into this next generation? What does innovation look like in financial services and what are the tools available now to help them get there?
Marla Sofer[41:06]
And my big realization was our industry doesn’t know its clients not nearly well enough. We definitely are not deep enough. We are another industry. If you look at what tech has done and how it has disrupted, it is by having access to the deep data about its clients to personalize, personalize engagement, personalize products, and financial services can’t do that because we don’t have that information, and so you have a whole bunch of companies right now that are popping up and springing up to guess that information. You will have a 85 propensity, you know, of likelihood of potentially getting divorced. But here’s the thing If you say something like that to your client and it was a guess and you were wrong you’ve just totally impacted the trust that you’ve built with that person. Our industry is built on trust, and so what I launched Knomee ToDo was to gather this data but to incentivize somebody to want to share it with you. They should share it with you because you are building a relationship of trust and when they tell it to you, you are helping them in that trusted relationship, as opposed to kind of spying on them in order to help them with information, with something that they never told you about in the first place. So anyway, that was kind of my journey. To know me was we don’t know our clients.
How am I going to say how am I going to create better products for people, how am I going to help people achieve their goals if we don’t know enough about them?
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [42:35]
Right, that’s great. Well, one last question for you, Marla. As I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, you’re very active on LinkedIn and quick answer. You don’t have to elaborate too much. But I’m just kind of curious how you’re finding LinkedIn lately. How have you grown your personal brand and gotten the word out about your business? You know any sort of advice?
Marla Sofer [43:05]
You have for people who are trying to do the same for their own business. Yeah, I would say LinkedIn, like every other social platform, it’s going to be. It’s going to be hard and fickle and you’re going to learn something, and then they’re going to change the rules and you’re going to be like. The most important thing I think to recognize is you just have to put yourself out there and get out of your comfort zone and I have definitely gotten out of my comfort zone.I was, I was, I still am very, very squeamish about taking videos of myself and speaking, like you know, to nobody and trying like tell a story. But I think that that getting out of your comfort zone and doing something that feels weird, um, is really important on social media and when you, when you’re speaking about something you really really care about, it comes through when you speak about something that is so inherently aligned with your purpose. Going back to kind of you know, the whole conversation For me over the last two years of kind of founding Knomee, that has been where I have found the best performance on my social media, Like when I’m going through something really emotional and I share it vulnerably, and it can be something emotionally like not good, or it can be something great, but it’s something that’s really authentic and really in the moment. And for most people, their first thought is not oh, I’m, I’m, I’m, you know, so sad and about to cry.
Marla Sofer [44:42]
Why don’t I create a post? And maybe that shouldn’t be your first thought, but those posts will get probably the most attention because it’s coming straight from your heart and it’s coming from this perspective of like what you’re really experiencing as a human and that’s what people like, that’s what educates and entertains and, you know, draws attention. Yeah, and also just consistency and not being deterred by all of the changes in the algorithm. There’s recently been a lot of changes. Linkedin seems to like TikTok-y type posts, you know, kind of with the cell phone size videos and the captions and everything else. So you just have to kind of keep at it and keep learning and don’t give up.
Jessica Gibbs, CFP® [45:31]
It’s good advice, good advice for everything.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [45:34]
Well, thank you so much for being here today, Marla Gosh. I’ve really enjoyed having you here on Off the Wall, and this was great.
Marla Sofer [45:42]
Thank you, I appreciate you inviting me. Thank you very much.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [45:45]
So, tell everybody where they can find you online and, of course, where they can find Knomee as well.
Marla Sofer [45:51]
Sure. So definitely on. Linkedin, is probably easiest just to find me. I don’t think there’s any other Marla Sofers in the world and my LinkedIn, my LinkedIn handle is just Marla Sofer and at knomee.com K-N-O-M-E-E, and so there’s no W. A lot of people like to put the W in the no, there’s no W, it’s just knomee, k-n-o-m-e-e, and we’re everywhere. We’re YouTube, linkedin, facebook. I think we probably have the most activity on LinkedIn and then after that maybe YouTube.
David B. Armstrong, CFA® [46:25]
That’s great. Well, thanks to everybody for listening and, of course, if you like our podcast, you can be sure to subscribe to our free as in F-R-E-E monthly newsletter, which we call Monument Unfiltered, and you can get there by visiting monumentwealthmanagement Monument Unfiltered. And you can get there by visiting monumentwealthmanagement.com/unfiltered. And you know I’m a little biased, but I think it’s packed with investing and wealth advice that you won’t hear anywhere else on topics that you know founders and business owners and executives all really care about. So, again, in case you just pulled over and you want to write this down, that’s monumentwealthmanagementcom backslash unfiltered. And thanks so much for listening and we will see everybody on the next one.
