April 2025
In this episode, Morton Wealth CEO Jeff Sarti and COO & CMO Stacey McKinnon reflect on the evolution of our firm, sharing the wins and lessons that shaped our journey, including how we’ve reimagined leadership, embraced innovation, and stayed focused on what matters most: our people and clients.
Here are some key takeaways:
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Welcome to another episode of Couchside Conversations. I'm very excited because today, Jeff Sarti, who's our CEO and myself, I'm the COO and CMO, we are going to talk about what it means to build a modern business. When I started here 11 years ago, we only had 18 people.
Pretty incredible.
And now we have almost 60 people. We have grown so much over the last decade. When we were brainstorming for this episode, we were thinking it'd be really nice to share with the audience the things that we've done. I think in many ways transform our business, like establish a marketing team and expand our operations, think about growth and new career paths and culture.
Things we weren't even thinking about when we had 18 people
We did not think that we were just like doing what happens every day when we had 18 people. So today we're going to talk about all of these things. So that hopefully anybody listening who also has a business can maybe benefit from a few of the ideas that we've implemented.
Super excited for it.
Do you mind starting with our origin story? And just how we've grown over the last few years.
Sure. I like starting with an origin story because to so many degrees, just when you're a business on your origin story, it really matters, right? If you're thinking about building a sustainable story and growth story over time. Your origin story and how you differentiate it matters tremendously. And to start with the firm. And then I'll talk about my history with the firm from 40 years ago by Lon Morton. Increible guy. He passed away about seven years ago. And at the core, his origin story. It was all around innovation. He was distinctly not status quo, not Wall Street. And he wasn't different. Just for different sake. He was truly different and outside of the box thinker. If it was in the client's best interest to find those innovative solutions. And so for me personally, when I joined the firm about 20 years ago, the truth is I was on the search for something similar. I was a little bit more classically trained in finance and wealth management, but a little bit disillusioned, honestly, with the status quo. And I think a lot of our industry is more focused. I hate to say it, but on self-preservation as opposed to innovation. And so I was lucky enough when I met with Lon and, and joined the firm 20 years ago to find a firm that embraced innovation to the, to the degree that we do, which is just really exciting, invigorating. To your last point around growth, I think it's tied to that origin story more than anything else. I think the reason we've grown sustainably and consistently over the last several decades, it is because we've kept that ethos and culture of innovation. We're all we're never complacent, right? Yeah, we're always striving to add value for our clients. And if we continue to do that and exceed client expectations, growth will come. And it has.
Yeah, I love that. And I remember a story that you told me when I first started where Lon would go door to door knocking originally before man on doors selling insurance. And one day he ran across this couple and he knocked on their door and he said, do you want to buy this insurance? And they said, oh, I'm thinking about buying a CD instead. And the CD actually made more money than what he was selling. And he sat back and he said to himself, what am I doing here? Like, they should not buy my product. They should buy a CD. I'm going to start a firm where I can innovate, and I can actually give clients what I think is best.
Conflict free advice, excuse me, which was so revolutionary at the time.
Yeah, totally. And I feel like that just launched us into how can we innovate? How can we innovate? We love change here. Maybe love change a little too much. We love change. No, no we're not.
I think. Do we drive our team crazy?
We might. We always are looking forward. We can't look backwards. We look backwards to honor the past. But we look forward to like, embrace the future, I think.
Yeah, totally. So can you talk a little bit about your history? So you mentioned 11 years. Can't believe that much time has gone by. Talk about the changes that we've under that have happened over the last 11 years with the organization.
Yeah, I think the biggest change that's happened is just our client experience. When I first started a client, if you ask a client who's their advisor, they would say, Jeff's my advisor or Stacey's my advisor. Since going from 18 to 60 people, we've really been able to expand every client's advisory team. Now they have two, three, four people on their advisory team. We have centralized investment departments, centralized planning departments. Our operations is centralized. We've expanded the client experience so much in the last decade, and I'm really proud of that, because it means that our clients are getting so many points of view, so much expertise. It's not just that one person you talk to, and they are supposed to have all the knowledge to have all the right answers, which is just not it's not really realistic in anything in life. You get a second opinion for a reason on stuff.
It even goes back to that theme of innovation. And to your point, it's not just one person giving that innovative advice we have now, the team collectively providing that advice, without a doubt.
Yeah. So I'm most proud about that. I feel like our clients are just they've been elevated to get much better services over the years. And I think before, it's not that necessarily the services were not as great. They were great. Lon was innovative. He built this company to be an investment firm. But really what we did is we expanded to financial planning, we expanded it to life planning. And I think that that's where all of the other team members come into play, too.
That was a huge change, right? Yeah.
But in doing so, we've had to spend so much time like building a new infrastructure for the firm. At this point, we have 13 people on our leadership team. That's 25% of our organization that's responsible for directing, managing, leading people, career pathing. We've had to add different programs like the Admired Leadership Program, which is a training and development program that teaches people how to be good leaders. The behaviors of leaders. And actually, I'll give an example. In one of the modules, they actually have the story of a CEO who had the best strategy in the world. But every day when he came to work, he didn't leave the door open for people. He just like walked through the door and then let us know what it's when he was in faces and after six months, they fired him as CEO because he didn't leave the door open. Because and the reason being, nobody respected him. But don't worry you dont shut the door in peoples faces. I think that you're actually the CEO that, like, opens the door, invite someone into their house, makes them a margarita, and then picks up their plates when they leave. So don't worry. You know you're not on the brink. But the Admired Leadership Program teaches our leaders the behaviors of leadership. So how to get feedback, how to hold people accountable, how to behave like a leader. And I think that's been transformative. A
nd the other thing we've had to do is institute new technology for training and development. So we have something called Morton Wealth University. That's our online training modules that has everything from better organizational skills to how to open an account and so much more. I think we have hundreds of videos now for training and development purposes. It's been a lot to expand the company to where we are today. But it's also been really exciting. I feel like we've been able to give so many people more career opportunities and then be able to help so many more clients over the last decade to love.
That you walk us down memory lane. That change has been fun. Yeah, it's been a lot of work, but it has made us better over the over the years, without a doubt.
Totally. Well, I just talked about where we've been. Maybe we can talk about where we're going. Like, what are your thoughts on growth and and the next steps for Morton.
Focus without a doubt is on growth. And even just revisiting that story that you just told that was not always the case, right? Call it starting about a decade ago and through those next few years, our focus was on infrastructure, building the foundation, investing in technology. So that we can ultimately scale for growth. But we did get to that point. And so in recent years, without a doubt, the focus has been growth. And of course, all companies want to grow, right? I mean that for the obvious reasons. But for us, we're not growing. We're not looking to grow just for growth sake. We're grow. We're looking to grow in the pursuit of being better, both for our clients, on the one hand, helping them provide better expertise, service, etc..
But also to your point, for our teammates on the other end, for them to have career opportunities, starting with our clients, our clients are looking to us to provide them advice and expertise. The only way to do that excellently is if we have really talented people within the organization, and the only way you can retain and incentivize talented people, it's through growth, right Talented people don't want to be part of a stagnant organization.
No it's boring. It doesn't change their stars. Yeah.
Similarly with clients we have to continue to innovate. We talked a lot about that. Invest in expertise knowledge. But also you even mentioned technology. Technology has become ever more expensive. You see the checks we're writing on a yearly basis upgrading softwares you name it that. Again it's only possible if we're growing as an organization now on the people side, growth is again so crucial because are people they're looking for promotion opportunities. As you said, I love the words use change their stars. Again, that's only possible if we're growing as an organization. They only want to grow financially. They want to grow intellectually. They don't want to be bored, stagnant. So they want to learn. And that's only possible through growth. And the last thing I'll mention, just with regards to our people, it's true ownership. We are really passionate about having a lot of owners, actual equity owners within the organization. A lot of our teammates, our owners. But again, if you're a sideways moving organization, stagnant, those equity opportunities just won't be there, right? So for all of those reasons, growth, it's just such a big focus of ours.
Yeah, I love that you mentioned the equity part. We love having expanded ownership. We do not want to be like the king and Queen on high dictating to the whole firm on what to do. Like 25% of our team are owners, 25% are on the leadership team. Like, the more we can expand the organization to really empower people, to lead teams, lead departments, lead clients. I think that that makes them more resilient organization.
And more fun. I mean, truly, I mean, it's just not us in our own silos, strategizing, etc. we're really collaborating with teammates that we love to work with. It's more of a collaborative, invigorating experience.
Yeah, it's fun to come to work every day. That's our goal.
So we're a 42 year old firm that's very long. So it feels like as we've been talking, we're doing a lot of things at a very established firm wouldn't do. But it also felt like in 2017 when law passed, we almost pressed restart and ask the question of who do we want to be? And so in some ways, we feel like a very young firm that just started.What advice would you give for business owners that are in that like, entrepreneurial, elevating their business phase, newer stage?
Yeah, a couple things come to mind. One is every firm is going to obviously have a vision around what they're trying to accomplish. And of course, that often starts with the leadership team or often the owner or the CEO. I think it's so crucial to put pen to paper. Right. Don't just let that vision stay in your head for a few reasons. One is it's important for yourself to exercise that muscle and be discipline and be precise. Because through putting pen to paper, you potentially will realize maybe there's some trade offs and you didn't realize if it just lived in your head. And so I think that discipline is important. But even more importantly, creating that vision, it's just more important for your team. Your team wants to know that they're rowing in the same boat. Where are we going? They want to be purpose driven, right? They want they don't want to just be focused on their own career. They want to be part of a bigger picture, which is makes all the sense in the world. So if you have a vision that's clearly articulated that obviously will inspire your team. That's that's the first thing that comes to mind. The second thing, especially with a newer organization where you only have a handful of people, is how to deal with cultural issues. Every firm has them, and specifically cultural disruptors. I mean, like bad apples within the organization, people who are disgruntled and every organization has them. And a couple things come to mind. One is deal with it head on, right? Don't just sweep it on the under the rug and let it fester, or else it'll grow over time. It's not good. You really have to problem solve and get ahead of that. And a couple strategies. One, it's a balancing act between, on the one hand, sometimes you have to trust your instincts and make the hard decisions. And I hate to say that, but sometimes you have to transition from people and you have. That's not fun. It's a part of business.
You know, sometimes you talk about it as choosing the team over at the individual, and that has to happen sometimes in business.
Totally has to happen. Yeah. The flip side of that argument, though, is sometimes there's more going on that maybe is resulting in that culture of disruption that actually has less to do with that individual.
That might be the symptom, but there's a bigger cause.
Crack that bigger cause could be potentially that individual doesn't have clarity around their role. Right. Maybe it's not. Clarity around promotion opportunities goes even back to the vision. Maybe the company doesn't have a clear vision. And so they're feel like a cog in the wheel. And that becomes unsatisfying over time. So I think with all of these things, it's it comes down to clarity, transparency, open communication that can help us solve a lot of these problems. The last thing totally different topic would be around building a network, especially if you're a young organization with only a few people. You need a lot of help. You're wearing a lot of hats, but sometimes you can't afford to make that next hire. That's why building a network is so crucial. So if you think about even just a simple example, let's assume a simple business like opening a hamburger stand, right? How different it is today compared to 30 or 40 years ago, how much more complex everything from how are we going to structure that business? Are you going to have a retirement plan for your employees? The ticketing system, it's not just a cash register, right. You have a technology ticketing system for your orders. Think about marketing. Right. You do you deal with marketing right. Website digital marketing. So many things that a business owner just wants to open. A simple hamburger stand now has to think of that's really only possible it if you have a deep network to really rely on.
So and for them to refer people in, for them to give you that advice, I even think about our team. I'm sure that we could pull the statistic, but I would guess that about 25% of our firm came from an employee referral or a network. Right? Like a quarter of our firm.
Yeah, exactly. Some you didn't even think of. Great. Great example. All right. So I talk about newer organizations. Can you talk about more established organizations. What should they be thinking of.
Yeah, I would probably just, simplify it to two things that I'd recommend. So number one is never forget that your goal in the client experience is to create raving fans. You want your clients to completely feel taken care of no matter how big you are, you don't want them to come to you and say you're a big company now. I'm now a small part of it. I'm going to be left out like, that's the nightmare. That's our nightmare, I think. Yeah, I think we want people to feel that way. And it's one of the reasons that you and I still work with clients. So we both have a handful of clients we work with because we want to actually feel firsthand. What's that experience? Yeah. Do they feel cared for or do they feel like their questions are being answered? Or any of our marketing materials confusing? We ask these questions to the clients that we work directly with, and I think that that's really helped us to make sure that the client experience doesn't ever go to the sideline while we grow the firm.
I love that you brought that up, even about how we serve an advisory role for that purpose. I just listened to a podcast the other day where it was actually talking about a restaurant owner, but this was a mess with lots of chains, and he said he still spends time at the front of the house as a waiter at times in the back of the house, at the kitchen, washing dishes. He's still, throughout the course of a year, will spend a day or two in each role just to touch and feel that, yeah, this really because it ties to the client experience. He wants to be so in tune with that.
It's so hard to know if you're just removed from it. Like I even find wearing. My COO had that. I'm able to find like operational things that can be done better just because I had to put the request in because it was for my client. Right. So I think that that's really important. The second thing is, I would always pay attention to what's happening in the world around us, whether it's in your industry or outside of your industry. And I'll give just two examples. So a lot of financial advisors are not on social media and are not investing into their marketing teams because they feel that that's not necessarily where their clients are, but they forget just one, like fundamental human behavior, which is Google, people meet you online before they meet you in person. And so what is said about you online matters and somebody Googles you or they Google me. There's actually content and material and they get to know us and they can meet us and they can understand our vision and who we are, and they can decide if they like us or not.
For I haven't searched my name on Google in a while now. Like I'm like, yeah.
But this is something that's really important. And so we've invested a lot of time and energy into our advisors and their online presence, and just making sure that that narrative is what we want it to be. And I think that that's really important. But another example, maybe of staying ahead of the times is just what's happened over the last five, six years in hybrid work, right? I think the world in general has been asking these questions over. Is remote right? It's hybrid. Right is in person. Right. And these are all questions that you and I have spent many, many, many hours getting through. And for a little while we had hybrid and remote. And then we kind of backed out of that because at the end of the day, this business is an apprenticeship business. Meaning like the best way for us to develop talent is for them to sit right next to the advisor and and learn directly from them. But we couldn't just, like, go back to the office full time, because that's also not what's happening in the world. We had to layer on some flexibility. Like if people want to coach soccer, they can leave early to coach soccer a few days a week if they want to go work remotely for a week in Hawaii, they can go do that for a week in Hawaii, we try to stay on top of it because we fundamentally know that the amount of time that we invest externally into our clients has equal amount of time has to go internally into our team and our people. And so I would say for businesses that are established, they really need to ask themselves the question, do I have raving fans? And if I don't know the answer, should I spend some time serving tables or, what's happening in the world around me, industry or not? And how should I adapt to the more modern times.
And be flexible One size does not fit all right? Like you even gave the example of us. It's not quite enough. It's it's not quite hybrid. It's sort of something in between that works for us. So every business is different.
Yeah. So I mention raving fans. I know what's really important to you is that we have clients that love to work with us. And so what makes a happy client?
It's a bunch of things. The first thing that comes to mind, and it is so simple. It's just responsiveness, just getting back to clients when they reach out. We all know how frustrating customer service is these days, right? You're on a on the call with the random one 800 number for an hour. And then you hear the click and you got disconnected. So it's just getting back to clients very quickly. Now that does not mean we get give them an answer right away. It's just that they know they were heard and we'll get back to them by a certain date with the answer. So that's that's just step number one. Another thing that comes to mind is our expertise. We provide advice. So again, it goes back to the conversation we had around innovation, never being complacent in the advice we provide. Our world is a very complex always changing. So when you think about financial planning on the one hand or investments on the other, always challenges, always new opportunities.
So we have to continue to find new solutions for our clients to meet and exceed those expectations. The last thing that comes to mind would be really the relationship itself. It's so important that they know that we care about them and that care has to be genuine and hopefully it's mutual. We it's so lucky that we are in an industry, and I think it's very rare. We're in an industry where we're often one of the most important relationships in a client's life. That's pretty amazing to be able to say. So, one that's fulfilling for us as employees of our of our organization now, where we can come to work and be able to say that every day. But I think our clients feel that as well. And so with those deep relationships, I think there's a tremendous sense of hopefully, knock on wood fulfillment that our clients feel.
I love that you brought that up. I mean, for so many of my clients, I feel like they're my friends, like, I, care about them. In the same way, when the tragic instance happens, I'm on the phone crying with them. You know, like, these are the things that I think are important. And it's important that we are invested in their lives. And and because we're a trusted person that they can call, we actually get to see one of the things people feel the most vulnerable about, which is their finances. And I think because we see their finances, it opens us up to be that person that they can share anything with. Yes. And so one of the things that you and I talk a lot about is just making sure that we have an advisory team that can truly be that, like counselor for our clients, too.
It's it's a wonderful but very important role. We play in our clients lives. A lot of responsibility associated with. So last question. We in the last year or so, we've launched a new service offering. We call it modern. It's tied to helping young earners and all their various choices and challenges. So around that themes theme of modern. How would you say your focus is with relation to modernizing our own business?
Good question. I think the first thing I would share is just our investment strategy. I feel like the way that we approach our investments is a modern way to invest, meaning. The reason that I say that is because, historically speaking, people could only have gone in stocks and bonds. That's all that's in there for, in case sometimes there's a little like real estate or gold position in your for okay. But for the most part they're limited to public securities. And I think that the future of investing and we believe the future investing is that there's a lot of things that you can invest in there, really. You just have to put the work in to find them and source them and do the due diligence on them.
And so the more we can give our clients access to more investments that we think are going to be resilient in most markets, that's our goal. In fact, I often say that, one of our biggest goals is when people are watching the news and they're watching the headlines and they're starting to feel that anxiety build up. We want that to be not related to their portfolio. Like if you watch the news, I don't want you to be worried about that, in fact, affecting your investments. And so I think a modern way to invest is to figure out how you de-risk the portfolio by investing in a lot of things that behave differently from one another and differently from the general economy.
Yeah. That's great. It's a very powerful thing to say to separate what's going on. The economy. Yeah, from your investment portfolio. But that's what we without a doubt strive to do.
That's our goal. We want people to sleep better at night. Yeah. The second thing I would probably say is that we've done a good job of modernizing the team. So our firm is about 50% men, 50% women.
Very unusual in this industry.
Yeah. I think the statistic is that, only about 20% of advisors are female. So that's very rare. And we have about 40% of our advisors are women. And so I feel really proud of that. I feel like we've done a really nice job having diversity of thought in our organization. And I feel like it's really important as we go into the future. I want clients to feel comfortable working with anyone in the organization, and I want to have enough people that we can find the right pairing for any client too.
It comes back to even the original thing we talked about around innovation. Creativity is one of the reasons that that's possible in our organization. I love the term you use diversity of thought. We have it right not only in terms of male, female diversity of experiences. So many of us, the two of us, even included, did not have finance backgrounds have come from different, different industries. So there's just, again, a real true diversity of thought and ideas.
Yeah, totally. I guess the last thing that I would just share is I also think that we've, like, modernized our approach to leadership. It used to be ten years ago that you just did whatever your boss told you to do. And that's not how we operate here. We have career paths with our team members every six months, we check in monthly to make sure they're on their way for their goals. We are actually engaging with our people on a daily basis. Culture matters very much to us. We want people to say that they love coming to work, and so we will do whatever it takes for that to be true, because ultimately, we know that happy people take care of clients and make happy clients. And so we think that investing into our team and into our clients in an equal fashion really produces, I think the the best business that we can both run.
Yeah. So well said. And I have a smile on my face too because it just again, we want a fun place to work where we're all in it together. And that's what we're trying to cultivate here.
And yeah, it gives you good vibes. And you just like want to be here. You want to be in the hallways, you want to hear the laughter. And I think that's our goal total okay. So we have a very fun game that we play in catch conversations called this or that. Yep. So you ready for it?
I'm ready.
Okay. Thank you so much for that conversation. So we play a very fun game here called this or that. And I'm going to ask you a question. You're going to ask me a question. And you just have to like what's the first thing you think of okay, I got it. All right. Would you rather have a 60% firm or a 15% firm?
Okay. Kneejerk answer is definitely 60. Partly because that's where we're at now. And it's fun. There are pros and cons to both, right? 15 has its own benefits. You're scrappy. As a young organization, everyone wears a lot of hats. There's a lot of spontaneous collaboration with the small team. So that's fun. But where we're at today, 60, there's so many more capabilities that and investments you can make to become better. We have a team. You hit on that before the deep team, the infrastructure, the support that we even have internally.
More friends to more friends.
So I'd say without a doubt 60 people. Sounds good. All right. Marketing, put your marketing hat on. Boots on the ground marketing or digital marketing?
It's like the past versus the future. I would probably I can I say both. That's cheating.
You always say. You always say that.
So I mentioned people meet you online before they meet in person. So I think that's important. But I also think that digital marketing is more effective when you have relationship. And I think relationships are the core to growth. And if you invest into people and you authentically care about them and you can help them in their lives and you identify ways to serve them better, I think ultimately that leads to more and more growth. And so I would say that from a marketing perspective, I would focus on relationships first.
It does sound like both though.
Yes. Cool. Okay, another question for you. Do you prefer hybrid work or in-person work?
This one's a slam dunk. Yeah. In-person work. And listen everyone's different. So I acknowledge that like many people can work well at home and find fulfillment at home. For me, I need the energy of the office. I need to be able to collaborate, joke around in the office, have debates one on one with people. So that's that's for me personally. That being said, also, every industry is different too. Yeah. So there are some industries that work really well in the hybrid or remote environments. But ours is. It's just not one of those you hit on the term apprentice. We are in an apprenticeship business, as you mentioned previously, the only way that young advisors can grow into experienced advisors over time. It's in office. Yeah, right. You can't learn that on zoom.
I thought I knew you were going to answer that way. I think both of us like if we would veer towards introvert versus extrovert, but we actually get energy from, like, doing the thing together in the office. Yeah. So, all.
Right, one last question. Culturally, when you're thinking about office environment, foosball or ping pong.
The reason ping pong is like more people can be involved in ping pong, like foosball. Just the one on one. Yeah. You like to keep elbowing people. It's a whole thing. That's great.
But it gets violent.
Yeah, I feel like I want to ping pong. I want to oversize ping pong table. And then I want to play a game called Around the World Ping pong, where, like, you run around the table and then you hit the guy. Anyways, ping pong is answer like I, I okay, good. Thank you for watching another episode of catch couchside conversations. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions. I hope you enjoyed the discussion today and we'll see you next time.
Disclosures: Information presented herein is for discussion and illustrative purposes only. These views are not intended as a recommendation to buy or sell any securities, and should not be relied on as financial, tax or legal advice. You should consult with your attorney, finance professional or accountant before implementing any transactions and/or strategies concerning your finances.
