Transcript

Ben:                 Hi, my name is Ben Smith. I'm welcomed by the Dustin Pedroia to my Chris Sale, Curtis Worcester. How are you doing today Curtis?

Curtis:              I'm good. How are you?

Ben:                 I'm well, I'm well so appreciate everybody tuning in again. Today we have a really special guest. His name is Charlie Dibner. Charlie is the president of Aurora Financial Group. And we're in Portland today-

Curtis:              Another road trip.

Ben:                 ... where Aurora is based. And one of the things that we've been talking about in talking about retirement success and people's own definitions of that and how personal that is for each and every person. But we wanted to kind of step outside of our skin a little bit here today and talk to another advisor that we really value and respect, and have a lot in common with in that's Charlie, and get a feel of not only just Charlie and his work, but also just have a good back and forth conversation about the financial advice world, how it's changed, and how it's kind of changed until today.

Ben:                 And I know there's lots of things rapidly changing almost in today's world. But I think there's a constant in terms of our own personal needs, and the human needs that we have and creating a practice and a business around that and then how that change will go forward. So that's really the conversation we wanted to have with Charlie today. So Charlie, I'll welcome you onto the show. Thanks for coming on.

Charlie:            It's an absolute pleasure, Ben.

Ben:                 I appreciate it. One of the things that we always like to start with, with all of our shows is to hear a little bit about you. And I know we all really like to hear stories. It is, "Well why is Charlie making the comments he is today? Why does he have that vantage point?" And I know that could go on for eons, but we wanted to get into the-

Charlie:            My wife frequently asked me that question.

Ben:                 So we wanted to really get into, first of all your history just in terms of your childhood growing up and you have a really great family experience that I think shaped you too and I wanted to really cover that. So can we just start off with, talk about your experience in growing up and what was that like, and how shaping you towards the financial advice career?

Charlie:            Not very normal, and not very trackable against what we think of as a usual lifestyles. I came to Maine when I was two weeks old, in the mid 1940s, and my parents had bought and proceeded to operate children's summer camps. Most the children who went to these summer camps, as too many of the main camps at the time, came from urban areas around the country. And we lived in the boonies for six months of every year, five months of every year, and then we moved down to the suburbs of New York City for six or seven months of every year. So it was always a cultural displacement, and a displacement of the standards that go along with culture. What was expected of you as a human being and a participant in Otisfield, Maine was not what was expected of you as a participant and a resident in Scarsdale, New York.

Charlie:            But that was part and parcel of the business. It was an upheaval for all of my siblings, but for me it wasn't because I love Maine, and Maine was my home, it just a matter of identification. So when it came time to becoming the declaring a resident for the purpose of voting, and at the time, more importantly for the of the draft, Maine was my residence, and I always knew I'd live up here. So that's really the economic and cultural background, and the social background. When people send their children to these summer camps, something that will come up in echo in the future, and my future, they expect, they want the kid, their child, or daughter, their son to become a tennis professional, a superlative Olympic grade horseback rider, be able to swim the English channel, two months later when the kid comes home. If the kid is happy, tanned, has a whole mess of new lifelong friends, and is babbling about things that he or she never experienced, has had that memories for experiences, the campus successful. Nobody's interested in your child becoming a professional at that point. That's pretty rare.

Charlie:            That was a displacement in terms of why people come into a specific kind of a business, why they use it, before they get there, and after they go out, what they've really gotten out of it, what was useful and what you were able as an owner to provide educationally for these children. It occurred to me pretty early on that if you focused on what they were going to come out of it with, not what they thought they wanted to come out of it with, you'd be light-year ahead, and you'd build a very successful focused and happy business space, that later translated in my entire approach to business.

Ben:                 What I think is really interesting about that, that obviously you have a family history with camps, is you talk to people outside of the state of Maine, and there's enough of the that population that they have this really warm, very positive thinking about the state of Maine because they either have experienced Maine through that prism that you just talked about with there's a camp, or maybe it's a formal camp that they'd had, or there's a family member that had their own personal cottage, or lake house.

Charlie:            Correct.

Ben:                 You know that they have this prism of there's a few weeks in the summer or the entire summer maybe, and we've almost been hearing it too, is maybe fast forward to them 30, 40, or 50 years later. "Oh, I always want to go back to that place because it just has this... It means family, it means happiness, it means leaving your cares behind, and then creating good friendships." All those kind of soft feelings that you just hear from outside the state about their intentions about the state of Maine.

Charlie:            It has emotionally, and in terms of what your surface thinking is, as an attendee at one of these camps, it uses a recreational window on the world, which is why Maine is a natural for it. The truth of the matter is, it is far more of an experience in personal strength, and growth, and happiness, and finding out who you are, and what you are, than it is really recreational. And it's an experience in independence, and for that reason people come up to the most beautiful place on the face of the Earth, with real pine trees and real water, and they come away with lifetime friends. But what they remember in their head is the pine trees and the pine cones and they want to come back up here, and live here. And it's a wonderful link, a wonderful and strong link.

Ben:                 And can you... And just kind of going through the family camp and the business and the prism there of, I've heard you say in several iterations about, the level of care you have to have if is you're running a family camp business in terms of "Hey, these people are sending you their most prized possession in their world," right? Their kids. And they're sending their children to you for guardianship, for taking care of them. It's not only just the, "Hey, I want to have a really great experience." But also there's a safety expectation that has to happen there. And that's a pretty heavy burden. Can you just talk a little bit about that too?

Charlie:            I certainly can, that was another part of the transferring what you got, and what one could get out of this kind of a business, the camping business, and transferring it into real life and getting benefits from it. When I first heard the term used mostly by the banks at the time, the term fiduciary, meaning somebody who was responsible for the care of other people, legally responsible. Responsible in terms of legal liability. When I first heard the term fiduciary used, investment providers, insurance people were not fiduciaries, they were not held accountable by the law or the culture for that kind of care. And here you are taking responsibility for somebody else's children for a two month period in a very active environment where if they fall and get a cosmetically unacceptable cut on their forehead you run real liabilities. Forget the horses, and the water skiing, and the rest of that kind of thing.

Charlie:            The term fiduciary where I learned the idea, not the word, meant something very, very different. I'm taking care of your children, don't talk to me about being responsible for $500, and it's a totally different level. Like I could couldn't understand at the beginning, why there was such an issue being made of your fiduciary responsibilities. And then simply adjusted it and used it as a flag, when I started the firms. We told people and published the idea that we were fiduciaries, whether the law held us responsible or not, we were putting out in our public image and in our advertising that we were fiduciaries, and if anybody understood it, of course there's a gift of trust that goes along with that exchange. And that's what we were looking for.

Charlie:            So you have a couple of factors you have learning to talk to people through their own ears, not through your mouth, telling them what you know is what they're going to learn from in the future, not the stuff that's written in front of you in a script that's wrote for selling a product. And you learned the degree of responsibility that we were talking about in order to run a financial place successfully for people, for families.

Ben:                 And it really... Only way I can kind of express it, it just feels like, it's not that you just have a minimum responsibility that you're just trying to meet all the time, is it's actually just a more of a statement of, that I care about you. Right? Here's the person in front of me, and they're saying here's everything I have in the world financially, and I'm trying to figure something out. And they want the other person that's trying to help them across table to actually express to them, "I care." And it seems like a small thing, right? As it seems like that would be a pretty baseline expectation that people should have. But we're running businesses, right? and people are running businesses and there's profit margins and-

Charlie:            Well you're running a business, but they're sending their kid to your place.

Ben:                 Yeah, so there's that... I think you can kind of blur those lines back and forth, is that somebody can take it one way versus the other, but the care is something that it feels like it always has to be there in whether it be camping or financial advising.

Charlie:            No matter what it was, it was really interesting. I used to sit back and think about a lot of this stuff, and I still do and smile. I never heard anybody come into any discussion and say, "Oh, I don't care about you. I'm here to sell a mutual fund. I don't care. We're going to do the least amount of work we possibly can, put in the least amount of effort to get your business." I never heard that done. So when I applied this, how do people hear it? They either don't hear that when I would say it, or they hear it with some degree of cynicism.

Charlie:            So one had to find a way to express that so it meant something. And invariably the answer is experience, not my experience, but your child's experience. That was the proving ground, the definition for people. Is she safe? Is she learning? Is my telephone absolutely clotted with phone calls from people I've never heard of from other parts of the world, and other parts of the country. Is she excited? Is she learning? That became exposing children to that and giving them that vocabulary, if you will, and became the knowledge that people had to have, and that's where referrals are generated from. The word trust became the biggest single word in my financial vocabulary, and had nothing to do with the financial world, or any thing I ever learned in the financial world.

Ben:                 Because it's really tough to then express feelings, right? Is to say, it's really a feeling, a comfort feeling. It's a confidence level. It's all those things and it's easy to say, it's really tough to deliver on consistently. And not only consistently but at a very high rate. Yeah, bad things can happen, but you care enough to minimize as much as you can those bad things happening, so the good stuff can happen too.

Charlie:            Yeah. Or you make a point of focusing on the negative thing and isolating it, so that what they're getting out of the discussion is that bad things happen, "I got a call from this guy and I got information from this guy and first rate care, what more could I want?" "My kid is in good care." And somebody had to tell me what the difference was between that and taking care of people's family's finances, I never saw a difference. At the time I was starting, the financial businesses were one way or the other all sales businesses, they involved selling securities that nobody understood. So it was great, you could almost invent your own vocabulary.

Ben:                 So I want to I want to keep going there then. So here we are, you have a really formative, just family experience with camps. In providing the experience for kids.

Charlie:            Living experience yeah, is everything.

Ben:                 And then kind of bridging that to, all right I get into a world of financial advice, and here's something where... Again and maybe at that time of... financial advice is a very new profession really, in the grand scheme of where things are.

Charlie:            Late 1970s.

Ben:                 Yeah. So how did you kind of get into financial advice? What was that bridge, and how did you discover it? And then decide also, this is something that I want to do?

Charlie:            It was one of the great strokes of Nobel laureate genius that one has in their life. I didn't, I couldn't do anything else. You know when you were in elementary school, I don't know if they still do it, you take these vocational tests where you take a pin and stick it in a thing, and then they tell you you're this kind of person, or that kind of person, or you should do this. Well, I don't even remember what they said, but I remember that every single one of them said, no matter what you do, don't go into anything that has to do with numbers.

Charlie:            You can do a lot of things...

Ben:                 But don't do that!

Charlie:            But if you're going to go into numbers, include me out. And I never questioned that, I was thought that as soon a standard. Oh, for probably many decades, the older generation in my family used to laugh when they saw what I was doing because there's nobody in the family should be doing that kind of thing, but they asked me to manage their money, so it was a small victory. I think that you put in a lot of effort, you're honest about the results. The concept of giving people financial advice was one of those ideas that had to be reinterpreted to successfully bridge from what I knew. The only thing I knew was the children's camping, how to take care of people's families, how to find out what was problematic, how to preempt it and deal with it. When you pick up the phone and call somebody parents and worry them? Did you see everybody during the winter time? What did they really want out of it? What was going to put together the building blocks of their future life? What was real?

Charlie:            Well, I've been doing this for over 40 years. I don't know anything about the stock market, and that's the greatest advantage, you just heard it folks. I don't know anything about the stock market. I know it goes up and down, I don't know when it does, I don't know how much it does, I don't know which sections of the economy do. I know that there are many professionals around the world who make a living predicting, or advising you on what it does. To one degree or another, there are people who look at past histories, try to put it together with what they think the future is, and go at a prediction or an analysis where there are betting odds.

Charlie:            I wasn't that smart, so I just told people I don't have any idea. I know what has done consistently well over longer, shorter, intermediate periods of time. I know what a track record has been, I know what they're committed to in the way of standards and performance. I'll bet on those people as opposed to, as Flip Wilson used to say, I don't know if... You guys probably don't remember, Flip Wilson was a comedian, as opposed to betting on the church of what's happening now.

Ben:                 Right? Yeah. When I was in college, I had a professor in college-

Charlie:            You were in college Ben?

Ben:                 I was in college once, actually did it twice.

Charlie:            Was Curtis in college?

Curtis:              I was, yeah. I was.

Ben:                 Yes, he was.

Charlie:            That's so unfortunate.

Ben:                 So there's a professor, and it is Professor Ford, and so somebody asked him about what he thought about the stock market. So he started talking about there was this one experiment where they put a chicken in a white room... Have you heard of this one?

Charlie:            Never heard it, but I like it's already.

Ben:                 Okay. The chickens in a white room and there a button and next to the button was a chicken feeder. So the chicken walks over to the button, pecks the button and nothing happens. So he walks around a little bit. Nothing came out of the chicken feeder. So he goes around and pecks it again, and a kernel corn comes out.

Ben:                 So he eats the kernel of corn. And he thinks to himself, maybe I should just go pick that again because I just got that kernel. So he goes in pecks it, and nothing happens. But he goes, "You know, that's not the chain of events though, what happened was I pecked it, I walked around a little bit, then I came back and picked it again to get the..." so he does that.

Charlie:            He was probably advised in his vocational tests not to peck on things.

Ben:                 Right. So that doesn't happen. So essentially, the long story of that is that, he does all these permutations of trying to figure out when the chicken feeder would deliver him food. And it was completely random. So at the end of the story, the chicken goes crazy. Because he just can never figure out the rhythm of, when does it make sense for this to happen. And he's trying to figure out what he did to get there. Which is-

Charlie:            I felt like the chicken many times.

Ben:                 And that's where I think when you're in the profession, and you start doing this, and you're trying to create your best ideas and put these things together is you can't systematize a random event, right? As things randomly happen, and you have no way of foreseeing things. There's no way to know all the externalities of it. And I always think back to the chicken experiment is this kind of...

Charlie:            It's a great story and probably has some truth to it.

Ben:                 Yeah, and trying to put control over something that really doesn't have control over, which is again, why do we want have Charlie on the podcast today? Because it's really more about treating the human side of this, and that's what I've come to love is this whole treating of the human side.

Ben:                 So I do want to just... I want to just hear a little bit of the history of, here you're getting into the industry in the 70s, in a very product based, sale based, pressure environment, and companies out there really pushing these ideas, and that "We have all the information about what's happening in the market." You don't Johnny Q Public, and we're going to sell you something that's going to make you money. But here you are with this camp experience, "How I'm trying to take care of people." I can just see the dichotomy of these two worlds, you inserting yourself into that, and can you just talk about that? And how that kind of reconciled for you or didn't.

Charlie:            Fear was the main means of getting from one place to another.

Ben:                 Which it often and sometimes.

Charlie:            Robbed that from Mel Brooks. I started out in a small Midwestern firm that had hit on what was probably about four years old at the time, an idea about how to communicate the idea of managing family monies. It was called financial planning, and it was putting science together with a reality. And that reality is that the language of exchange, of which money is the symbol, the icon, is the only universal language. When you go the next time when you sail into the Harbor and you decide to buy New York, you'll do it for beads, and it's the language of exchange. Doesn't matter whether you can speak their language, or they can speak your language, you understand that these beads are valuable, and I can buy New York for five red beans, and four yellow beads.

Charlie:            So in discovering what the language was, and then looking for answers to a lot of these things or directions out of them, you become more driven by these oddball experiences where you can't connect things, where the language isn't quite making sense. Everybody knew the words, everybody knew the ideas. I had no idea what half these things were about. The educational base I got from that first firm was wonderful, except it was very difficult to make a living selling an idea that nobody had really heard of before. So I moved to what was the standard in the investment worlds, the financial management worlds, I moved to a brokerage firm, very well known one, and I learned the business from their point of view, which was very different.

Charlie:            This is what we learned, my assistant stuck her head in my office one day and said, "Did you have anything to do with this trade of 500 shares of IBM?" I said, "No, why are you asking?" And she said, "Well, somebody decayed it." I said, "Oh okay, no I didn't have anything to do with it."

Ben:                 Which means like disqualified the trade, right? So they canceled the trade? DK.

Charlie:            They canceled the trade, right.

Ben:                 Just for people who don't know.

Charlie:            She didn't say that, but... This is, you've got to understand, this is 40 years ago, she said they DK'd it. "Oh that's great." Then I overheard her going next door, and she said the same thing DK'd it and went around to all of the brokers, and said the same thing and nobody had DK'd the trade. So I said, "Well maybe I did DK the trade, I don't know what DK is." So I went next door and I asked the guy, the guy was old enough to be my great-grandfather and I said, "Well, what does DK mean?" He said, "I don't have any idea."

Ben:                 Oh boy.

Charlie:            So I would walk to the guy next door... well to make a long story short, I went around the whole thing and asked everybody, and nobody knew what DK meant. They knew that this particular action, canceling the trade was called a DK. So I went to the assistant. I said, "What does DK mean?" She said, "Don't know." I said, "No, no, no. What does it mean? What does the term mean?" She said, "Don't know." I said, Deedee, "What does this term mean? What does it do?" She said, it means D, don't, K know, don't know. We don't know who placed the trade, so we DK it. We don't know."

Ben:                 Oh my goodness.

Curtis:              Oh wow.

Charlie:            I learned more from that exchange than I learned about all the stock analysis in the world but that didn't stop an entire firm from talking about it just because nobody knew what the hell it meant. Excuse me for...

Ben:                 Yeah, go ahead.

Charlie:            And to learn what you can know, and to learn more importantly what you don't know to identify the questions, as opposed to the answers, is a great piece of knowledge. And I would put together in my career firsthand experience, boots on the ground in all of the investment areas, the areas that concern family monies, insurances, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, financial planning, estate planning. I just put myself through that year after year. Education has always been very important and still is. The financial planning world has changed completely from what it was conceived as.

Ben:                 And that's what I want to... I wanted to ask you about that next because-

Charlie:            Foresight on my part.

Ben:                 Yeah. Is to kind of go to this point of when you start entering the financial advice world, is I think stocks and bonds, and the transactional nature of investments is really where a lot of the industry was.

Charlie:            It's where the money was made.

Ben:                 Yeah. And so this idea of financial planning comes out, which is very soft, right? As it doesn't necessarily have a product, it's not really a product itself, it's more of a service, which is maybe a different idea to the industry.

Charlie:            Well, nobody had really figured it out.

Ben:                 Yeah. I guess that's what I wanted to ask you about is...

Charlie:            That didn't stop them from selling it to the public.

Ben:                 But in terms of, if you're selling financial planning in the 70s at that point, right?

Charlie:            Late seventies, 79.

Ben:                 So if you're selling financial planning, what did that mean in 1979? What were you actually doing for somebody?

Charlie:            Well, when they really started with it, it's so interesting, they weren't selling financial planning. They were using the idea of financial planning, the structure of it as a marketing tool, and then I saw the first little box appear on a desk called a computer, maybe eight inches by eight inch screen. Somebody had it, I don't remember what they had to do with tickets to put information into it to produce something they already knew. And the brilliant idea came down from the gods above was that we are going to start doing financial plans produced by a computer. You'll fill in certain forms, and the forms will go through the machine and produce this really polished report. I couldn't do that either. You think about it the second you put a period at the end of the last sentence, the report is obsolete. It doesn't mean anything anymore because it's about the future. It's not about where you were.

Charlie:            Now there were certain kinds of people, certain... not kinds of people, but certain people who thought in that kind of organizational way, that it was important to the people who were engineers, had that kind of background. My recollection is that people who were architects that was important too, was a very, very organized... Some people would have called it compulsive, a way of looking at things, but like everything else, when you sit down to talk with somebody about it, their eyes glaze over because they didn't understand the basic ideas. They all understood one idea, and that idea was, "I am so dumb. I don't understand any of these words. Everybody else understands them, but I don't. So either you have to explain it to me or..." There was just a dislocation. Well, I didn't understand a lot of it either, so we were all in the same boat.

Charlie:            That's what the whole bridging the gap was about. How do you begin to find a way to get to say things that they will hear, not get them to hear what you're saying? It's a very different idea, you speak through their ears, in their heads. And if you listen, they'll tell you exactly what it is and how you need to speak.

Ben:                 But from an industry perspective, this financial plan idea comes out. Isn't it-

Charlie:            The wave of the future?

Ben:                 Yeah.

Charlie:            In five years everybody was going to be a financial planner, or you weren't going to be in the business.

Ben:                 And I know from what I've read and anecdotally hearing is, wasn't financial planning almost just a really great way to design something that made it more compelling for someone to buy another investment product, or two, or three, or four?

Charlie:            There was always a lot of that yet, yes. The answer to that is yes. However, I think that socio-politically, economically, I think you have to be a little cynical, and ask yourself when the idea that is the United States of America, where you are free to pursue whatever you want to pursue, as long as it's legitimate, and in many cases as long as it isn't legitimate.

Charlie:            What does the United States sell to the world? Do we sell democracy? Or do we sell capitalism? That was a tough confrontation in my own head because when I really boiled it down, we sell capitalism to the world. Russia certainly adapted to capitalism pretty damn well. They didn't adapt to democracy. Iraq adapted to capitalism pretty well...

Ben:                 China.

Charlie:            And you could look at China, look at Japan, so it's not a bad thing. But the system that people really love about the United States is what they can do if they're successful in capitalism, and then socio and politically, we tell them that a democratic world is a better... a much more egalitarian way of dealing with your fellow human being in a society. Well, the business thought it could sell financial plans. I realized that in order to... I started putting stuff into these computer forms, and what came out of the computer had nothing to do with what it would have been, we had to know how to do it manually first, so you had to put into the computer what you knew it would digest and give you the answer you wanted.

Ben:                 Right. So it's preordained to almost what you want to be selling at that point. What you think they should be doing, you're kind of creating a document that shows them what you want them to do.

Charlie:            Then it was just too much for me. So there went, everybody had to be a financial planner in five years, but as information became far more available, and it went from something that you had to search out and look for, and take time to put down and communicate, to write it, or to listen to a radio, or a television, as it became the very wind around you that was blowing against you all the time, information constantly coming at you. A lot of these different things began to meld into one, and what people needed and were really looking for was to understand, and lend some intelligence to their financial future. They wanted to just know.

Charlie:            They would ask, "Do you know anything about insurances?" "Yes." "I probably need some life insurance. How much?" Well, there are empirical ways. There are formulaic ways to figure out how much life insurance somebody needs under what circumstances. I in my experience of buying life insurance never ran into anybody who showed me any of those. But there are ways to do it. So you would do an insurance analysis for people, and show them this is what you need, and why you need it, now let's go shopping for an insurance contract that provides you with that kind of thing. And by the way, in 15 years these numbers will change, and then you will have to update this.

Charlie:            So that was really what financial planning was and what it became. And it is still to this day, very difficult to make a financially successful business out of selling financial plans as a product. You really need, I think, I don't do it, but what one really needs to be able to use it as a structure for getting people, for answering their questions. "What do I need? What do I need to educate my kids? What happens if I walk across the street tomorrow and get hit by a bus, blah, blah, blah..."

Ben:                 Which is again, what I like about what I see in your practice, and what we're doing in our practices is this it's an organizational tool, right? This is a-

Charlie:            It's an educational tool in an organization.

Ben:                 Yeah. And it's a decision making process, right? It's not saying that we're always going to get the best decision, but we're saying, here's all the inputs that we can factor. We can look at all together. We can have a conversation about who you are, what you value, what don't value, what we see in the world today. What do we think are likely outcomes to happen? Putting that all together to say, here's what we think we should do. And as you change-

Charlie:            And why you should do it.

Ben:                 And why you should do it, yeah.

Charlie:            And when you should change it.

Ben:                 Yeah. And as things are changing in maybe the financial world, they're looking to the advisor, or the planner and saying, "Hey, I want you to come to me and say, 'Let's sit down. And I think there's something that's a change.'" And then maybe vice versa, that there's something in their personal lives that are impacting you know, "I had a grandchild." Whatever has changed. Or, "We have a medical issue." Whatever is going on that they're coming back and saying we need to re-huddle because all these plans, and I think today you hear them, like with these really sophisticated software tools because the computers have changed 40 ways to Sunday in 40 years, but they really haven't because all they're doing just simulating more different paths, right? Because they say, well this is a Monte Carlo scenario, 40,000 things, which who knows what happens.

Charlie:            And half the people who used to use Monte Carlo scenarios to sell securities never knew what Monte Carlo scenarios and there really were. Where they came from, and what they were based on. And it's exactly true what I thought people... What I wanted was an advisor that I could trust, to say "No," to say, "I don't have that answer, but I'll get it for you." I could trust is their information. The question was, if something happened to me, where would I want my mom, my wife, and my family to go to for solid, lifelong advice? And that was the goal. That all came out of... This starts in camping, a little bit of an abstract path, and a wandering path, but that's really what it was and is today.

Ben:                 Because that's the core value, right? And that's what I have taken from you Charlie is, "Look, I live by these tendencies, core values in my life, and this is what's important to me. And financial planning is just one way for me to express this in the financial advisory world that I'm doing is..."

Charlie:            Exactly.

Ben:                 But you could be teaching, you could be doing 40 other things. This just happened to be a way for you to... you have an expertise in it. You have an experience that allows you to express those values, so that's what I've liked about kind of seeing your path, and in getting to know you over time is that.

Charlie:            That's really interesting. You know one of the guys who founded Guidance Point, AJ Walker, I met close to 40 years ago. He and his father had brought their business down to Portland. They moved into the same office building I did, right across the hall from us. We met, and within three or four weeks I said to him, "It may take 30 years, but we're going to be in business together. We're going to be sharing a lot together." Because Ben, what you referred to as core values, future direction, what we were looking for was common to the two of us. It was, yes, we shared it. And if you step back, you could see that. And it was crystal clear and it took us a long time to be able to get our business structures arranged, rearranged together, for the magnetic fields to come together, and the stars collide before we really began to look at anything like that, and to share ideas, and to find a commonality in the kinds of things we did.

Ben:                 But it all goes back to in whatever shape or form of anybody in the future. But if whoever your team is around you have to share core values, right? There's got to be things that for your business to be really successful, if you're a customer... All these things has to be aligned, is that your customers are looking to you, or your clients and however you want to frame them, they're looking to you because of those values. And that's what makes you different.

Ben:                 And that if I, working with Curtis today, and I hand a client off to Curtis, that Curtis also shares the same values and vice versa with you, right? It's so important, which is it's really tough to I think build businesses over time because you're saying these are things that are uncrossable lines for me, here's things that I'm not willing to do, or I'm not willing to go to. Or this is how we do business here, and these are the values that are important to us and these are the ones that were... And this is how we want all interactions to go in the care we have to have and the relationships we want to be building, and so every interaction... And I've heard this gentleman Mark Ensign has said this, how you do one thing is how you do everything.

Charlie:            For the most part I think that's true, yeah.

Ben:                 Right. Because even if you're being sampled in a way that somebody just sees you in one interaction of, here's somebody that needed help for a second, and they'd fallen down and you needed to pick them up, but you walked by. Well even that's the only glimpse that somebody has into you that says a lot about you, right? Is in the moment, what would you do? And how would you treat somebody? And how would you behave? And that sort of core value of every little thing you do, and it's important that... You know, someone walks in your door and maybe they're not the right client for us, for whatever reason. But do you immediately start treating them like they're not the right client for you?

Charlie:            Maybe you are not the right person for them.

Ben:                 That's right. And it's saying... but my job with you right now-

Charlie:            Is to be trustworthy and earn their trust.

Ben:                 And to get you in the right place. Even if it's not with me, you're in my care.

Charlie:            What can I do to help you?

Ben:                 Yeah, and you're looking at me...

Charlie:            How much can I do?

Ben:                 Yeah. It's this trust of, I don't care if you have $100 million or 50 cents, you're coming to me and saying, "I need help with the money. All the money I have in my world, and this is what I have, and it's the most important thing to me and I'm looking to you for expertise."

Charlie:            There's the respect for that, for what is important to other people, and what they can do. Yeah, one of the problems with this constant wind of information, and noise that goes by us. Is that a phrase like core value, you hear so much that it begins to mean, core value. It doesn't really mean anything. So you ask yourself, "What is a core value?" It's really not complicated. It's been around for a couple of years. It's called like do unto others as you would want done to yourself. Really that simple. You run your business that way, you interface with the rest of the world that way, you're going to do a pretty good job with this thing called core values. And if that's what people are entrusting you to do, fiduciary was the word we used, it's all tied together. It's all very singular.

Charlie:            As I said, I think it's been around for a couple of years. You do unto others as you would have them do to you.

Ben:                 Yeah, that's right. Maybe a couple.

Charlie:            Right. And is it idealistic? I don't think so, I think it's really quite functional and quite simple, I never thought it was quite idealistic. Do you want somebody to come into your house and do a job for you, and put in as little work as they can to get the job acceptably done? Or do you want them to approach the job by putting in as much work as is needed to get a good job done? So that's what you got to do. You got to really... you don't have to, but I think you approach no matter who walks in the door, how much can I do for them? How much can I do to succeed in giving them what they need in the language they need to hear it, to answer their questions, and to help them in the future. So they know this is where I got really good advice a long time ago. He took time out, his people took time out, they asked a couple of... they did a couple of things for us, and he disappeared, and he never even charged us for anything.

Charlie:            And is doing something for nothing good? Well I think it depends upon what you're doing for nothing.

Ben:                 Right? Well and maybe there's a value, could measure it with what you're doing too at times, is maybe what you did was nothing for you, is like maybe that's just a marketing cost of, "Hey, I had a conversation with you, and it didn't cost me any more than I would've had coffee that day for 15 minutes anyway." And that's not a big deal. But to them... And you poured everything you did into that conversation.

Charlie:            Exactly.

Ben:                 Right? That meant the world to them. Because here's somebody that... And for whatever reason we hear this maybe enough to be remarkable of people saying back to us, "No one's ever talked to me that way. No one's ever said to me what you just said, or put it in a way that I have actually understood it, the way you just did it." And that to me is the highest compliment I think we could have.

Charlie:            It ties it all up in one nice-

Curtis:              It's the light bulb right?

Charlie:            ... pretty package without any knots to keep you out of it. And it's very important you do with other people what you would want done to yourself, or to the people you love more than yourself. You take care of them, that's what you do.

Ben:                 And I want to... and again a lot of the talk that we were having today is on this evolution of financial advice, right? And how it's impacting the people that are seeking that. And there's a pressure in financial advice because it's a business. Because the pressure of the business of financial advice is to continue to do more, and I say more as in continue to meet more clients and manage how you can treat them. Maximize the number in the amount of time that you have.

Ben:                 And that's a really hard place to be as a business because the only way that I know, and I think that you've expressed, is to get a relationship with somebody, is to spend time with them, and to spend enough time that isn't on the clock to truly understand them. And you and I have had a conversation about, there's people telling you their life problems, right? And they're, telling you "On a scale of zero to a hundred, how happy are you right now?" And you're asking that question, and they say "10%," and you're going to move on from that conversation and say next? that just that conversation, that question, that answer haunts me for about four weeks.

Charlie:            I'll bet it does.

Ben:                 Right? It's like... And I'm kind of getting emotional about it, but like that's something I just get stuck on, and I just can't get out of because I just keep thinking about that person, and their moment, and kind of where they are, to go "But you know what, Ben? The business side says you need to just move on, and there's another person that needs your time, and get that next client. Bring them in, get their money, manage it, charge a fee, and keep growing your business."

Charlie:            We want tomorrow to be better than today, and we want it to be a little bit easier than today. I don't think that's realistic, but that's what we seem to want. The problems with that are that growth is a word, it does not really mean anything. There's growth in many different areas in different ways, and part of what we referring to as a core value is where am I growing to? What do I really want this to look like? Do I wanted to be an aggregate of a lot of pebbles? Do I want it to be a uniform thing. How do I want this thing to be structured? And the easy way to teach business to people is that more is better. More gives you more choices, brings in more money. Yeah, you want to have more campers in camp, but you also... it's a multi-generation business. Great-grandparents went there, grandparents went there.

Ben:                 And how you get there matters, right?

Charlie:            Very much so.

Ben:                 I guess that's what I wanted express here is that. Because I think from an industry perspective on the average, everybody's kind of chosen the route to efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, right? It's just let's kind of minimize as many tasks as we can. Automate wherever you can, get in as many clients as you can, and that's how we're going to grow, this continued on the margin, reduce cost to expand revenue, and maybe this slower growth way, or maybe the not as sexy approach to growing your company is to go "Or, you know what, how about I give such a great experience to the people I'm serving, and they really feel that I care. They really feel when they step in and sit down with us. They're the only person in my world, and they have my hundred percent attention."

Ben:                 I'm not having my phone ring, I'm not having my, I'm not having CNBC on the wall, and whatever. The only thing I care about is them for as long as it takes to get their answers solved and they're going to tell people because of that experience. And they're going to receive good care because of that experience. And that's how we'll grow. It's slower. It's slower because it's word of mouth and it's people referring, but having a second to none experience, to me is the way to grow, and to get there.

Charlie:            That's a core value.

Ben:                 That's a core value, yep.

Charlie:            And to paraphrase William Shakespeare, to thine own self be true. And that's really the important aspect of it. You can only in any kind of a long or short run be what you are. And it is vital to the inherence to a core value, the creation of a court core value, the honoring of that core value, to be true to what you are, and what you can be. I mean we're getting philosophical.

Ben:                 We are but-

Charlie:            We're getting... because things just don't have that consistency. All people that walk in the door don't want the same thing out of it, they want different things out of it. And you can be different people to some degree, but you also need to be very strong about being the same person while you're doing that, and you work through it in time, and you don't want to violate the essence of what that core value is to you.

Ben:                 And I've learned this lesson, and maybe a lot of last four or five years, especially start learning it is, once you start getting out of survival mode in your business, especially in financial advice, you're not just taking the take... Is this idea of, there's going to be the right personality and matches for who we are, and what we're about. And those are the clients. I want, I don't want to get the client that says, "You know, Ben..." And we just talked to a lot about like market timing, and all these things, and picking stocks and "Okay, you can do it. But if that's the only thing you want me to do, probably not going to be the right choice." I'm not going to be the one that you're... I don't want to just do the service to do it to just win you as a client.

Ben:                 I'd rather it be, "Here's what I think I can do the best. Here's where I can really impact your life. This is how I want our relationship to work. And if that's something that's interesting to you, I want to work with you about that. I want this to be a 50/50 relationship of I'm hearing as much about you as I'm delivering back." And if it's just, "Hey, you're here to just pick something, or just invest this way." And that's just not what I do, or it's not what I do. Well, I'm not going to be happy with that either. And I, I'm looking at you as a client. I'm going to go, that's not something I want to do, and I'm not excited about it either, and that just dilutes who I am as well and my happiness.

Charlie:            Well you know we seem to equate in our literature capitalism with greed, the pursuit of economic standards of success and failure with greed, but that's been around since human history, and human perspectives had been recorded in the Old Testament. There are pointed descriptions about farmers leaving wheat in the fields, wheat that they didn't use for the people who didn't have the ability to pick up quote unquote "the scraps that they weren't going to use." It's a very important story I think, because you don't need every scrap that's out there, and you can get a lot more out of the human generosity that enables other people also, and that that helps other people. So many of these ideas, frankly, are not just some a matter of getting out of the way they tell you you have to do it, think it through.

Ben:                 Which is why I think you coming on and obviously you have your own RIA, registered investment advisory firm, Aurora Financial Group, and here we are a Guidance Point. So could you classify us as competing? Sure. But who cares? It's really I think for all of us, we all can be on our own silo, and do what we do well, or have our own flavor to us because we're all individuals, and we all do things a little bit differently. But for the most part we're probably doing things more similarly than differently, and to get together and just say, "Hey, let's just share ideas." Right? Here's what I see, or here's where I'm thinking. The more you're doing that, I think you're delivering better to your ultimate client. I think we owe ourselves to just get our head out of the sand a little bit, get out the day-to-day and just share stories. What are you seeing? What are you thinking? Because we're all going to grow that way as well.

Charlie:            People, my observation of watching their eyes sort of retreat a little bit when I use the word marriage, but these things are all marriages of one sort or another, depending upon what you define the word marriage to mean in a particular situation. And if you want a successful marriage, they're not 50/50 deals. It's two people each giving 70 or 80% to make up the common 100%. It depends upon what you want out of the marriage. If you want a partnership, it's 50/50. If you want a decent relationship, it's 49/49. If you want the essence of what we all talk about for marriage, you got to give more than 50%, and make it work.

Ben:                 I like that.

Charlie:            So it's just... it depends upon whether you want to do more, or you want to do the minimum you can, and just get by, it's all part of Ben's core values.

Ben:                 Yeah. Can we... I want to have a wrap up question here for you, because I know we talk about retirement success as an idea, but I want to maybe forecast future, as I think we all have kind of our futurism hats on, and we try to think about where's the puck going, and we're kind of a hockey state as well, so that's why isn't the hockey reference here. Obviously we talked about financial planning where it was when it first started to today, and thinking about where things are. What do you think the evolution of the advice industry, where do you think that goes the next 20, 30, 40 years? What do you think the experience, how does it change? How do us and our practitioners, and as we deliver that service, how is that going to change you think over time?

Charlie:            We are coming to a point in our scientific development where the big subject of the foreseeable future, the big socio-cultural educational argument will be about artificial intelligence.

Ben:                 We're already seeing it, right?

Charlie:            We're beginning to see it already. Right now we are at the very beginning of asking the question, what can artificial intelligence do? How much can it do? How much faster can it do it? Less expensive can we do it. That's not what's going to happen at the end, the final evaluation of the relationship of artificial intelligence to humanity is going to be what it can't do. What it takes human beings to do. There will always be that in existence out there. That's what the essence of philosophies and religions are really about, they're answering the questions that are not empirically answerable.

Charlie:            When we're all said and done, and artificial intelligence is normal and significant part of our day-to-day life, what won't they be able to do? What won't it be able to do? Because you know something, it can help me, but it's not going to replace me. It's not going to replace my heart. It's not going to replace the values. It's not going to replace what I believe. It's not going to replace the smile. It just isn't.

Charlie:            If all this sounds like a sale for religion, I'm not a particularly religious observant person, so it shouldn't. Do I have faith in humanity? Yeah, I think we're probably the most underused product that ever existed on the face of the Earth. I think that the tyrannosaurus rex was a better used product than we are, there's a lot more for us to do. I would love to be around, I'd love to be a fly on the wall to watch some of this stuff get done. It will not be... The robots will make it easier, but it isn't going to be the robots that hold your hand.

Ben:                 I agree. Well Charlie, really one, appreciate you coming on the show today. Thank you for, just the back and forth and great conversation.

Charlie:            You're a tough interviewer.

Ben:                 So we will wrap up this episode here, but I appreciate you coming on.

Charlie:            My pleasure. I appreciate your having me and I hope that the people out there will wake up when I get off of the air.

Curtis:              Okay, gotcha.

Ben:                 Thanks.

Charlie:            Thank you very much, thank you.

Ben:                 Whew. Wow, that's quite the episode with Charlie today. It was good to have Charlie Dibner on the podcast. We kind of went a few different ways.

Curtis:              There is a lot.

Ben:                 A lot there. And again, what I was really happy about is look, Charlie has been a practitioner of financial advice in the state of Maine his whole career. And here we are, we have a lot of career left in us, as he does too. But you know, in regards to where we are really great lessons to go back and forth with Charlie. So again, I was really happy he agreed to do it, and in addition to that of he's just somebody that, through my network, and our network, and our colleague AJ. AJ has been personal friends with Charlie for some time.

Ben:                 So I've known Charlie here for a better part of seven years. And that's Charlie, and what I really value him is the conversation we had about core values. That was a really important piece because you know, I kind of got a little choked up myself about it today, but this, the things that we really believe in, we really care about and those are things that are just deal breakers if we're not going to violate our core values. And again, that's what I think makes his practice very special, and that's why I'm very excited to be at our firm Guidance Point Advisors is we all kind of share that together.

Ben:                 But Curtis, what was your takeaway from today?

Curtis:              So I really enjoyed the background story with Charlie and his family running the summer camps and how he then moved from the summer camps, obviously to the financial advice industry.

Curtis:              But the piece that really stuck out to me as he talked about the word fiduciary, and just the meaning of it, and I think he was referencing the banks, you know when the word first surfaced if you will. And he talked about if him as an advisor loses someone's money, as a fiduciary that'll bring on a lawsuit. And this ties into his core values and he talked about running those summer camps and he said, "If I lose someone's child, or a camper is gone," that's more than losing someone some money, and so I think that really stuck out to me because I've heard, certainly through my relationship here with you Ben, and AJ, and everyone here is... I've heard... I have not known Charlie that long, but it's there, it was clear to me there was an alignment of values there, and that really solidified it. You know, hearing that story.

Ben:                 Yeah. And again, what I appreciate of and I've heard his story a couple times, and how he tells it really well, it just has such a formative point in his life that really has driven everything in how he thinks about things. And again, he failed... or he had the aptitude tests that said don't go into math and financial advice. But because of his point of view and how he was shaped, that was a very formative thing of why he cares about people the way he does, and how seriously he takes those responsibilities, and those relationships. So from our side, I just love that, sharing that back and forth was really helpful. On the other end, again I really liked from my takeaways is hearing the progression that he has seen in terms of financial advice industry.

Curtis:              Yeah, it was very interesting.

Ben:                 And kind of hearing how it's changed, especially in the state of Maine. And where again, we're pretty rural state. It's really tough sometimes for people to have close proximity in terms of geography that they're having an access to an advisor, especially one that used the word fiduciary, that is in that realm, and to even understand what that means. So I think Charlie did a really great job expressing that, because you could just look up the dictionary, and read the word fiduciary, and read what the definition is. But it's another thing to really experience, why is that an important thing, and why do people care about it? And even going beyond doing something for somebody else and ahead of what your own interest is, that's a powerful thing. So again I really love that.

Ben:                 But in regards to if you want to learn more about today's episode, again appreciate everybody tuning in. But we are, our blog, is blog.GuidancePointLLC.com, and we're \10 is going to be this episode.

Curtis:              Episode 10.

Ben:                 So you can have links to Charlie, to read a little bit more about him. We'll put his firm's website on there too. So again, we're not saying a your only choice for advice out there is Guidance Point Advisors. And again, we think highly of Charlie and Aurora Financial, it's a really phenomenal practice that Charlie has built there. And again, knowing the choices as people are searching that service out. That look, there's lots of choices and Charlie is a really good one too, so I want to urge people to consider that. But if you need more information, again go to that website, and we appreciate you tuning in, and looking forward to the next time.