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Financial advisor Matt Reiner

Industry Spotlight > Advisors

How a 36-Year-Old CEO Finds Time for 3 Firms, a Podcast, Fiction Writing ...

By Jane Wollman Rusoff

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In an increasingly complex world, why should financial advisors be spared from escalating challenges? Indeed, they’re not. Here’s the scenario as seen by advisor and entrepreneur Matt Reiner:

“There’s more noise. There are multiple opinions being thrown around. Sometimes advisors have to be on the defensive and become the psychologist more than ever because they’re dealing with all these outside, uncontrollable influences,” argues Reiner, the 36-year-old founder and/or partner of three financial firms, in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.

Included in that list are Benjamin, an artificial intelligence fintech company that Reiner co-founded and of which he is CEO, and Capital Investment Advisors, with $4.3 billion in assets under management, which is focused on “the millionaire next door” and of which Reiner is a managing partner.

The third firm is Wela Strategies, an RIA serving the mass affluent. Reiner, a chartered financial analyst and certified financial planner, is co-founder and managing partner.

In an interview, the winner of a ThinkAdvisor 2022 LUMINARIES award for Thought Leadership and Education holds that the biggest challenge facing advisors today is “redefining their value proposition for clients as we continue to evolve as an industry.”

He devotes most of his time to Benjamin, but, boasting ace time-management skills, is able to give plenty of time and thinking to the two other firms as well. Reiner, who says he’s “dedicated to helping the industry grow and evolve,” would like to see a few changes made therein.

One is that advisors ought to “share what works and what doesn’t work for them,” he says. ”The more we share our best practices, things we’ve learned and things that we’ve failed at, the better the industry.” 

The advisor started his career in 2009 at Atlanta-based Capital Investments Advisors, a family business founded by his father Mike Reiner, now chairman. Matt’s brother Mitch is also an advisor and partner.

Matt has somehow made time to write a series of books about a fictional psychotherapist for RIAs. “Dr. Cole Cash Will See You Now: Cole and the Next Gen” (Redwood) was reissued last year. Cole (aka Reiner) helps advisors grapple with the worries and challenges of their job. 

Then there’s Reiner’s interview podcast, “Bridging the Gap,” found on www.MattReiner.com.

ThinkAdvisor recently held a phone interview with Reiner, speaking from Atlanta. The thought leader, who even blocks out “thinking time” on his calendar, self-describes as “a recovering perfectionist.”

“I keep tinkering with my process. I’m trying to make it as perfect as I can, even though I know it will never be perfect.”

Here are highlights of our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: You’re an advisor and a founder and/or partner of three different financial services firms. What’s the secret to your time management?

MATT REINER: I have very consistent routines in the morning and at night, because to have the brain power to focus on multiple different things, you need to have some standardization in your life.

When I’m not on calls, Zooming or in meetings, I spend time thinking. I structure my calendar so that I have thinking time throughout the week. I need to think about certain tasks with regard to my roles and responsibilities at each of the three businesses.

What’s your morning routine?

I’m an early riser. I work out every morning. I meditate. I read. I spend a little time with my kids. I do some journaling. I read some more. Then I get into my day. It’s two to three hours before I open my email.

What’s your nightly routine during the week?

At the end of every day, I check off what I’ve done that day and set my agenda for the next day. I determine what my top three goals are for that day. This can expand or contract based on my calendar. 

As many nights as I can, I have dinner with my family. I enjoy time with my kids. I put them to sleep and have personal time with my wife. I’m in bed pretty early. 

Tell me about the “Dr. Cole Cash” book series for financial advisors that you author.

They’re fun, light-hearted short-story business fables. Dr. Cash is a made-up character from South Carolina who’s a therapist for financial advisors. They talk to him about their worries and concerns about the industry. His knowledge is my knowledge. The books cover some of the major concerns and challenges facing RIA firms.

Such as?

Their feelings that they aren’t valued because of the advancements of technology; how to serve and deal with millennial clients and employees; how to build a next-gen practice.

Do you think it’s more difficult to be an advisor today?

Yes. There’s more access to information and more noise that advisors have to deal with than ever before. Clients are getting information from multiple sources. There are multiple opinions being thrown around. People are making decisions on incomplete information. 

So sometimes advisors have to be on the defensive and become the psychologist more than ever because they’re dealing with all these outside, uncontrollable influences. It’s a matter of how you get ahead of all that and then how you diversify your service offerings.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the industry, and what are you trying to do about it?

What made us who we are today isn’t what’s going to make us who we are tomorrow. For example, investment management was at the core of what built our investment advisory firm, Capital Investments Advisors, early on, when my dad started it.

That’s still part of the [core], but the huge challenge firms have is redefining their value proposition for clients as we continue to evolve as an industry.

How do you deliver more value and more services and do so in an efficient and effective way? How do we continue to grow our firms and the number of clients, while giving them a consistent client experience?

The way I’m trying to help with that is with Benjamin, which is a workflow automation company. We connect advisors’ processes with our technology to execute the menial and mundane tasks persistent in the industry. We make firms more efficient.

What’s one way that you think the industry should change? 

[To an extent], everybody is holding tight and not sharing what works and what doesn’t work for them. There’s so much opportunity for all wealth management firms.

I’m working constantly to build a community and be a voice of different ideas, different ways of thinking, different tactical steps that advisors can take to build a firm that’s impactful.

There isn’t going to be one firm that wins it all. So the more we share our best practices, things we’ve learned and things we’ve failed at, the better the industry.

How else are you trying to improve financial services?

Through my content, my website [and] my books. And I hope to do that over time with the companies we built to help create more efficiency and help [advisors] diversify their value and services to impact their clients in a more efficient, effective way. 

My passion is for people to have access to a human financial advisor because I’m passionate about this industry.

When you were very young, did you aspire to be an advisor?

It was either an advisor or a professional baseball player. My professional baseball dreams were quashed pretty early!

I spent a lot of time around my father watching him in the business, and I thought that that was the only profession out there, really.

But being in this business has allowed me to grow in many areas that I enjoy. It’s allowed me to have an impact on families and learn how to build relationships. It’s allowed me to have a voice, especially in 2009, when I started in the family business professionally.

You worked at Bank of America and Charles Schwab before you joined the business. Why didn’t you just skip those other firms and go right into your family’s company?

I worked at those other jobs [during] summers. I felt it was necessary to get experience at other firms. I thought it was a learning lesson for me to evolve as a person and gain experience in something outside of the family business, which I had worked at when I was in high school.

What was challenging for you when you joined the firm professionally in 2009, near the end of the financial crisis?

Naivete: I hadn’t experienced the root of the crisis. Many people had been through a lot of those dark, dark days. I was coming in on the tail end of it.

There were a lot of war wounds that [advisors] were dealing with because of phone calls [they received] in 2007 and 2008 and the major challenges that they [posed]. I knew about that but hadn’t experienced it.

So it took me a second to become empathetic to and understand it, as opposed to just saying, “Well, this is the way it is now.” I learned a lot.

You won a 2022 ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES award for Thought Leadership and Education. What do you consider your outstanding qualities along those lines? 

I’ve had experience on both sides of the business: the management side, helping to build a successful wealth management firm; as well as being in the seat of the advisor. I’ve also started and built a technology firm.

I keep tinkering with my process because I’m a recovering perfectionist. I’m trying to make it as perfect as I can, even though I know it will never be perfect. So the constant desire to learn and evolve has helped me.

Jane Wollman Rusoff

@jrusoff2

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