Welcome back to the 348th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Jeff Jones. Jeff is the Owner and Founder of Cypress Financial Planning, an independent RIA based in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, that oversees $275 million in assets under management for 380 client households.
What’s unique about Jeff, though, is how he built his own financial planning spreadsheets in Excel, and has developed coding and integrations that automatically populate into a PowerPoint presentation, that he then shows clients to help build a story for their financial plans and give them the motivation they need to achieve their financial goals… while also still being able to know and audit where every single number in the projection came from.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Jeff leveraged his early years as an engineer for Lockheed Martin to develop the macros and Visual Basic code for his Excel spreadsheets to create more customizable and in-depth financial plans than he could with traditional off-the-shelf financial planning software, why Jeff felt compelled to build his own spreadsheets because he felt it would give him more confidence to answer client questions about the underlying assumptions and the details being presented to them (because he deeply understood the innerworkings, and the limitations, of the planning spreadsheets he built), and how Jeff has spent time over the years iterating on his spreadsheets so that his expanding base of advisors could easily add data and get the information they needed themselves for their clients… which worked so well that his business partner Ben branched off and teamed up with TIFIN to start his own FinTech company that further built out Jeff’s financial planning spreadsheets into an actual piece of software that they now sell to other financial planning firms.
We also talk about how despite building the planning spreadsheets, Jeff was not as interested as his partner to starting up a FinTech company and instead gave Ben permission to develop the spreadsheets into standalone software with an agreement that Jeff would receive an equity share and would be able to use and develop his master copy of his spreadsheets for his firm, how, even though Jeff is only 39 years old, he has already begun sharing equity of his advisory firm with his advisors with the intention that he can possibly move on to other endeavors in the next 10-15 years while his G2 advisors can continue the firm’s legacy, and how Jeff worked with FP Transitions to value his firm and to help build equity agreements where partners can buy in with a modest down payment and pay back a seller-financed note that accumulates equity through multiple tranches over time.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Jeff shares how he chose his equity agreement with his advisors because even though they would be essentially paying him back with the profit distributions of the firm he owned in the first place (such that he would be sacrificing his own profits and shares), he felt that this was the best way to help incentivize his partners to stay and give them better opportunities to become successful and help grow and scale the firm further, how Jeff found his first advisor mentor while he was still working for Lockheed Martin by cold calling advisors in his area and simply offering his time to help in any capacity he could and asking if he could just pick their brains about the industry so that he could start his own career in financial planning, and how, even though he has some time before he retires, Jeff already has plans to work more in the pro bono financial planning space once he has the time, energy, and his own financial freedom to be able to give back and create greater impact in the lives of others (with his passion that financial planning should be accessible to all no matter how much money a client has to invest).
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how Jeff likens creating his Excel spreadsheets to that of an artist with a blank canvas where the end product is only limited by his imagination, how Jeff built macros into his spreadsheets so that when he makes updates to the data that supports assumptions in the master file, the sheets created from that file also update, or how, after working for Lockheed Martin, Jeff intentionally took a job at Goldman Sachs as a financial analyst so that he could get the industry experience and knowledge he needed to launch his own firm, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Jeff Jones.
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