How Brandon Hatton infuses Conscious Wealth into his Family Financial Planning Advisory Ep. 117

But as we start to think about money as something a little bit beyond just our own, or to say that it's really not just our money as a thought. Then who's is it and how can you use it to unify other people?

Welcome to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. How do people end up becoming an entrepreneur? How do they scale and grow their businesses? How do they plan for profit? Are they in it for life? Are they building to exit these and a myriad of other topics? Will be discussed to pull back the veil on the wizardry of successful and FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS. My book, RELENTLESS is now available everywhere Books can be bought online, including Amazon and BarnesAndNoble.com. Try your local indie bookstore too. And if they don't have it, they can order it. Just ask them. The reviews are streaming in and I'm so thankful for the positive feedback as well as hearing from people that my memoir has impacted them positively. It is not enough to be resilient. You have to be relentless. You can go to TheRelentlessBook.com for more information. Thank you so much. Brandon Hatton is the owner of an unusual financial services business called Conscious Wealth based in Florida. We talk about how he works with his clients in a very non-traditional way, how abundance and love are at the forefront of their approach, and how to determine how much money you actually need or don't need. Now, let's get right into it.

I think it is all about abundance and that sometimes is hard for people to. Just maybe just might just be a word to a lot of people, but when I think about abundance, we think about the lack of fear. Just a knowing that there is enough, that there will be enough worrying not only will not help me, but isn't even necessary that things will come to me or are already in my life as I need it. That's really what it's all about.

And what services do you provide to people that come to you?

We really have two separate lines of business, and then they're just so interwoven together. Our newest one is what we're, and we're quite excited about, is the Center for the Conscious Family, and that's where we bring families together and work with family facilitation. So we're having really difficult conversations with families about whatever they need to talk about. Oftentimes it has to do with money, and that's what's very valuable about me being in the room. I am a trained facilitator, but also an investment manager. And then my colleague and close friend Alyssa Harper is in the room and she's a licensed therapist. And we say it's not financial advising and it's not therapy, but it's somewhere in the middle, and it's a really exciting process to bring families through that process. So there's that

Who, and opts in for that. Who's gonna say, yes, come to my home and talk about this really challenging thing that no one wants to talk about, especially with their family, with a therapist, even though it's not therapy and a financial planner, even though it's not that. How do you get people to say yes to that?

First I will say that we don't meet in people's homes. Because that's not neutral territory. So ideally what we do is meet with individuals potentially in their homes, but then we bring them somewhere like neutral territory. It may be a vacation home, or it may just be flying them down here to Miami and staying in a hotel and putting them through a weekend of dinners and group activities and conversations. Who opts into it? There's always someone in the family who's seeing that they're not where they are as a family, where they want to be. Sometimes it's the younger generation. Oftentimes it's, the matriarch and we're called in from that person and saying, "Hey, look, we want to get there, but we don't really know how to."

Very interesting. I have personally never heard of this approach. Is anyone else doing this?

Not a lot. What makes us unique about it is that we're doing it, but informed with the financial side. So if it were just informed from the psychotherapy side, which is how Alyssa and I met studying that, that's nice, but like you need real hard numbers behind it. And if it's just coming from the money side, it becomes dry and it misses the humanity part of it. So us combining it, it's not common and it's, that's what we're so thrilled about it for. Yeah. So that's our new, that's our new software.

I think you're pioneer in your industry.

Pioneers get slaughtered, but we'll see.

You're somewhat post pioneer. I don't know. I'm trying to feel better.

No, it's okay. I'm just,

Entrepreneurs are often, including myself chasing shiny objects and the next big best thing. What do you make of this and how do you speak to that? When you talk to your clients?

Entrepreneurs are always chasing the next big shiny thing. I think that's great. I think that's wonderful fighting that would be fighting their, potentially their nature, and at the same time, it might also be really helpful to understand. Why they're chasing it. And so I just got back from a really big trip. I was in Nepal with a really close friend of mine Bruce and Bruce in 1999 went to Nepal and had a five year old, sorry, a seven year old waiting tables on him. And he said to his "Sure", he said, "What's going on here?" And he said she was adopted by the family. She worked for two years, but now we need to get her in the workforce." And he said can't I just give her money to not go to school?" And they said there's no way to guarantee that, that's really gonna get to the family or to get to them so you can give it. But, she might still be working. And so he came back, went back to Atlanta in mind view, he's an entrepreneur in 1999, running a big tech company and said, we're gonna start this thing. And him and his wife started this. Organization to help kids. And they started just like pure entrepreneurs not really knowing what they were doing. I see a problem, let's try to solve it. Let's put through two kids into private school. Two kids turned into four kids. I was on the trail hiking towards Everest base camp with four of his kids. He's got over 20 kids in his programs. He's got kids all over the country. And what was really interesting is in 2006, he sold his company, got his big payout and he still had, getting to your question, that entrepreneur drive. But instead of taking that entrepreneur drive and saying, I'm gonna turn my whatever million into two x that he said, I'm gonna have a different way to measure my impact. And he said, I work harder now than I ever worked building a software company. So looking for the next big thing is good, but also looking at why am I trying to build that next thing and is that really what's gonna give me what I want? I admire a lot, him and Susan, his wife, for building up, and it's called HCC a Himalayan Children's Charities. If you wanna learn more about their story, it's pretty cool.

Interesting. So you're not saying don't do it, but you're saying really look at the why and not the why. That's necessarily financially, but also internally.

Internal's the real big one.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So how can people, regular people and entrepreneurs. The unicorns of the world specifically determine how much money they need to make so they know they're bumpers. And I find myself in a similar situation, especially the more money I make or accumulate, I don't know what the ceiling is. And I think a lot of us don't. We just keep going and going and we forget. Why and when we can stop and maybe work on nonprofit things with more of our time and energy or just chill out for a minute.

Yeah.

To help your clients figure this out.

Absolutely. Yeah. That's a big part of our conversations that we have. It reminds me of a story, and I just read this the other day, St. Francis of the Catholic tradition, or Francis was in the garden chilling soil, and somebody came up to him and said, "Francis, if you died today, if you knew you were gonna die this afternoon, what would you be doing?" And he said, "I'd be tilling soil." Like it was just like, oh my God, that makes so much sense. That makes so much sense to me. And so you could apply that question to, okay, I just sold my company. If I could do anything, if we knew I was gonna die tomorrow, would I open another company? Maybe not. And is the purpose of opening a company to scale and sell, or are there purposes beyond that and is the purpose profit? Or is profit the outcome or the result of a purpose-based company? And obviously I'm biased towards that. If you've read my book Conscious Wealth or know that it was published by Conscious Capitalism, you would know. That's where I'm leading towards purposeful business by far. One of the most, like I'm way past the money on business right now.

But are you past it because you have enough and you know what enough is?

Yeah.

For your circumstance, could be completely different than mine, right? You may need a different number. Clearly you're still charging money for your services, so it's not that you're like, okay, I have enough, and now everything is free.

Yeah. I'd like to add a little qualifier in there. I do have enough, or I will have enough when I need it. So I can't just stop working today. I would have to drastically change my lifestyle, but I can just let go of the need to earn money. And also, as I was gonna say before, my job's entirely too stressful to do it for the money. I do it because I like to see my teammates grow. They're younger. I do it because I like to serve my clients, but if I was just doing it on the money that you can't get paid enough for, it's a really stressful work. And as most of our as many our jobs are, So having enough isn't necessarily there's enough zeros in my bank account. Having enough is that also I will have enough and I made it to this point and I'll make it to the next point. And I don't know how long I'm gonna live. Like I have no idea how long I'm gonna live. If I knew how long I was gonna live, I would know how much money I need. But I don't, I could die tomorrow. I could die today. So

I never really thought of it in that way. Certainly I have, but not in the how much do I need?

Yeah.

I'm not thinking about, I have an estimate of how long I'll live based on ancestors, but that does not take in account for.

Getting hit by our garbage truck. Yeah.

When I walk outside.

I like to get hit by ice cream trucks, but garbage is funny too. Mine has a happier ending. I'll tell you two people who have too much money, and I tell this story a lot. The first is dead people. They have entirely too much money. Whatever they have, it's just too much. The second group of people that have too much money are people who are ill. Or even a health scare. You don't even need to have a bad diagnosis, but just a, "Hey, maybe you should come back in and get this checked out." You look at your bank account, be like, "Why didn't I spend that? What is the hell doing there?" So that's when you know you have too much, and when you get to the point of too much, and it could be that I also, it could be a divorce, it could be any type of major tumult in your life. Then you can come back and say, okay, now I know what is too much. Let's work towards figuring out what is enough.

And what is your, your own opinion? Because of course, all your clients will have their own about leaving your wealth to your children and to the generations after you. I have an opinion about that. I will share with you, but not until I hear yours.

Actually, every single one of my clients has the same belief on this conceptually, is that they want to give their children enough money to be successful, but not so much that it ruins them or it takes away the joy of being successful. Everyone now where that is, what that number looks like is where the center for the conscious family comes in, or consulting and all that. Or just even looking through the investment side of our business, which is looking at what money can do and teaching next generation like what money can do. Because one kid may think one inheritance is really big and the other may think the same number's small. They don't really under, not all children, adults, or youth understand what money can do.

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Sure.

Just lost

Yeah.

Just,

yeah

no purpose, miserable and I don't wanna set the stage. I'm likely not to be a billionaire and I'm not sure I'd want to, but I would never do that to my kid. I would never give that much wealth to my 27 year old daughter, or even lead her to believe that was something for her in the future. Because man, I think that kills the spirit.

Yeah, so that type of communication's really important with Next Generation and what we try to bridge, because although some people will say it's dangerous to tell your kids how much they'll inherit, I believe that it's more dangerous to not tell them, because then their imagination could take away and then they could be sorely disappointed or they could be making life decisions based on something. So real transparency around that over time with guidance, giving them some money, seeing how they do with it over time is a lot more effective than. The proverbial reading a will in a dark room or a library or studying.

Does that still happen?

Not really. Just on tv. Just on tv.

It's definitely still happening on tv.

Yeah. Yeah.

So switching back to your company, not just what you do and who you serve, but your team, what is it comprised of currently?

So we have a core team of two planners that work on the investment side and they meet with clients on day-to-day needs, financial planning investment management, and then the three of us with some external accountability partners manage all of the money internally. So that's five. I would say three, and then I won't, we have some really strong partners, but these are the three of us work. And then on the other side, which is the living side or what the Center for the Conscious family is, Alyssa Peace and I

I asked this question because when I started this podcast, I was only interviewing people that had two to three full-time in employees. And I was so adamant about that because we talk about company culture and core values and team bonding. Especially since the pandemic business owners are changing the way that they work. And in fact, for instance, someone that I recently interviewed has a 10 million company with no employees. Everyone's contract. And I used to think that it was a level of pride that I was employing my employees and giving them these benefits and such. And I just, I feel like the tide is changing. What do you think about that and how would you see yourself in the next year or two? There's no way to know for sure, 10 years from now what you might do.

I just wanna make sure that there's W2 and 1099. Yeah. W2. That's not really that I was talking about. Yeah. And I'm not so concerned about the tax designation of the people that work for me. I'm more worried about the commitment that I have from them and the way that we work as a unit and the way that we treat each other, and the way that we build something together. I'm not out we're in a very personal business talking to families about very personal issues and their money. Managing money is very personal, so everybody's gotta have full in terms of we're not outsourcing people from another country that we never see. It's a, and I don't think that'll ever change. For us, I know we have external partners to support our investment accountability or on accounting or HR and marketing, but as far as like the core group that interfaces with clients, we're all in and I don't see that changing.

Is that a new structure for you, or have you In the past had everything in house? Everyone was a W2 employee and that was important to you?

You know what's interesting is originally I was a W2 employee. Like many advisors, investment managers, we get our chops in the big shops. I started at Merrill Lynch went to Raymond James and now broke off independently to run my own company. So it is a good way to learn the business and then some of us just don't fit in that mold much longer and have to find a way out.

Yeah. I guess we talked about earlier how families. Raise their hands to have this sort of service. But how are you sourcing your clients? And second of all, what is your strategy for growth this year? So two-pronged question.

You know what's amazing and such a gift about my work is that we get a lot of referrals from our current client base, and that's by far our largest. But what we do is things like this. We go out in the world, we talk about abundance, we talk about love, we talk about generosity and unity, and we attract clients. And if we don't see every engagement, whether it's a talk or a podcast or a workshop as a quid pro quo, because at the end of the day, we just know. That we're doing something that we believe in that creates value. And when you do that enough, it comes back. And I remember we, we were doing one in Atlanta about a half a year ago, and on the other side of the wall was another advisor. And my heart really felt for him because he was there talking about like annuities. And I like,

that's not very,

it could have been I've been in that position like, are you ready for retirement? Are you really ready? And I'm sitting there talking to a community foundation saying, how can you give more. How can you be expansive during a time of financial contraction? And we didn't get any clients from that, and we didn't care. We just had a great day. So that's how we do it.

Speaking of retirement, I've been hearing a lot of people talk about I'm helping an 81 year old author with a book that she wrote called Refire Don't Retire. So Refire Your Life and Yeah. Other financial advisors saying, you may make an exit, you may be at retirement age, but is retirement really the solution for you? And do you work with people when they're about to retire? Or thinking about the retirement, is that part of the suite of services that you have?

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. I think that's still the number one goal for everyone. It's just now retirement looks very different than maybe your parents or indefinitely my parents'. Vision of retirement and way different than the generation before them. As I said, I'm in Florida and I see people who are retired all the time, but it doesn't look like it used to.

Do you bring in the other person, the therapist, to talk about what does retirement really look like? Like it looks like one thing and then you hear of people retiring and some of them, if they don't have a purpose, they aren't long for the earth sometimes and then those with a purpose or with another engagement. I think golf is always what a lot of people are like, I'm just gonna golf really. For 40 to 50 hours a week, you're gonna golf.

Can't imagine. Can't imagine. It's not my, it's not my thing. I think when Alyssa comes in and the two of us work together with clients, it's usually with more something like a contentious divorce or some type of issue in the family, or even just transition of a business or transition of inheritance when somebody gets stuck like that. And at least in our client base, they find their way out. And we have that talk with all of our clients right away. Don't retire in the winter. Don't watch the news. You're gonna get nervous the first year. You're laughing. But these are the things we tell people you've been doing just fine, not watching the news for three decades. You don't have to start watching it every day now, and by larger clients, stay active. And that's really it. So it's not so much of, we would gladly help, but I think they're doing okay. They're really strong.

Is there anything else that you wanna talk about with the two conscious brands that we started the episode out? Anything I'm missing?

I don't know if you're missing, but I think something that I was gonna talk about and then we didn't really get to was the thought of inheritance. And I think you told me your opinion. I don't know if you had more to talk about that. You said that you see some cases in your area that isn't working well.

Yeah. In my social personal life, I see some people that have made, I think, catastrophic decisions with their wealth. And they probably met well with it.

Sure.

It really ruined a lot of, and did it ruin it or did the individual. Was that just helped to not find the purpose. But yeah, like for my, my in my will and trust, I have steps of what my daughter gets at what age, right? Age appropriate receiving, age appropriate responsibility.

Yeah.

And making sure that there's enough support, but enough room for her to keep discovering herself and not just rest on what she may inherit.

Yeah. That's great. That's smart. Yeah. This question of answering how much is enough or how do I, which is really asking yourself, how do I cultivate more abundance in my life? Part of it is just acting with abundance, and what that means is just doing it, giving money away, and being very charitable and deliberate about that charity. The typical model or the traditional model is when I'm gonna save up all this money. I'm gonna use it while I have less human capital, and then I'm gonna give it all of it to my family. Right? And I think that's what we're seeing is there might be some problems, it might be problematic, but as we start to think about money as something a little bit beyond just our own, or to say that it's really not just our money as a thought and something that we talk about within conscious wealth that it we're just custodians of this money because we can't take it with us. I talked about if you die it's no longer yours. Then whose is it and how can you use it to unify other people? How can you give money to somebody, not just your children, but somebody's children you've never met? Which we call charity. And in practice, use this as a unifying force, as a, so instead of something like money that can divide us, how can it bring us together? A lot of people say I gotta make sure I give my kids enough money, because if I don't, it's a real tough world out there. And that's a valid argument. But on the other side of the spectrum is it's a really tough world out on it, and I wanna make the world better that my kids live in. And how do I find the two of those, like a compromise between the two, and it doesn't have to be one or the other. And there are stops along the way, such as I'm going to use my business to support the families, my the people who work for me and their families, and have these other types of ripple effects as well. So there's it's not just all or nothing and practicing. Generosity or giving, it will cultivate abundance.

What led you to this conscious? I'm reminded, I just started hearing about conscious capitalism from Kent Gregoire. I, do you know him?

Kent's a good friend.

Does everybody know each other in this space? So I started hearing about this, a few years ago for the first time, whether I was not aware before or if it's a new tagline or thought process. How did you come to that?

They had an event in Atlanta and I went to it and read Raj and John Mackey's books. So Raj Saso and John Mackey, who are the founders of the movement. John Mackey was the founder and c e o of Whole Foods, and it resonated, it made sense to me. I think before that I had that health scare that I spoke of before. I had a situation where I was back when I was working in the broker dealers, the big name shop, and I had everything financially that I wanted. Everything looked really good. And the doctor said, "Hey, we need you to come back in. We're gonna need to look at something." And it was a pretty scary moment for me and started to reevaluate like, okay, I've got too much and I don't have the right things. And it was, I'm grateful for that moment. Yeah. For more information, go to the show notes where you're listening to this podcast. Want to know more about me, go to my website, NatashaMiller.com. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you loved the show. If you did, please subscribe. Also, if you haven't done so yet, please leave a review where you're listening to this podcast now. I'm Natasha Miller and you've been listening to FASCINATING ENTREPRENEURS.