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FEFP: Inside the Strategy Room: Growing with Purpose (EP93)

FEFP: Inside the Strategy Room: Growing with Purpose (EP93)

What does it take to grow a financial advisory firm the right way, without sacrificing client experience? In this episode, John and Tommy pull back the curtain on the strategic direction of Mason & Associates, sharing how they’re enhancing services, refining internal systems, and ensuring their clients feel heard, supported, and empowered. Whether you’re already a client or someone searching for the right financial advisor, this episode offers valuable insights into the kind of care and intentionality you should expect from your advisor.

You’ll learn why Mason & Associates believes in practicing what they preach: working with a coach and consultant themselves to stay accountable and constantly improve. They also discuss capacity management, why quality over quantity matters, and how to ask the right questions when choosing an advisor. From succession planning to aligning your financial goals with real-life moments, this conversation reminds us all that you only live, retire, and die once—so make it count.

Listen to the full episode here:

What you will learn:

  • Why we hired a business coach and consultant. (2:37)
  • What we love about helping our clients. (6:40)
  • Why we are so excited about hiring a business consultant. (8:00)
  • The importance of acknowledging when you need help. (11:00)
  • The value in outsourcing and delegating. (15:48)
  • The benefit of continuous improvement. (20:00)
  • How YouTube has improved our marketing. (26:00)

Ideas worth sharing:

  • “You only live, retire, and die once.” – Mason & Associates
  • “We try to control our capacity, and we try to control when we take things on with clients, because we want them to have the best experience and we want to get it right.” – Mason & Associates
  • “Do you want a financial planner to just make the decision because it’s easy, or do you want someone who is going to invest in helping you do hard things?” – Mason & Associates

Resources from this episode:

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Read the Transcript Below:

Congratulations for taking ownership of your financial plan by tuning into the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast, hosted by Mason & Associates, financial advisors with over three decades of experience serving you.

John Mason: Welcome to another episode of the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. Today your hosts: John Mason, Tommy Blackburn. And in this episode, we’re gonna have fun ’cause we’re gonna dive a little bit more into what we’re doing at Mason & Associates from a firm-level direction, how we’re going to enhance the service that we’re providing to our clients, how we’re looking to continue to grow and nurture this business that we’ve been involved in for quite some time.

And we think that’s directly related to you as the listener of the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. One. If you’re a client, we hope that you’re excited in the direction that we’re going. If you are a do-it-yourselfer thinking about hiring a financial planner, then hopefully this podcast episode will be insightful and help you as you search for a financial planning firm.

Maybe some questions that you could ask them, maybe some strategic thinking about the people you’re partnering with. And then hopefully just getting to know us a little bit better as humans. I think ultimately we do a good job sharing who we are, what our thoughts are, and we hope that you enjoy getting to know us as people.

But in this episode, we’re gonna dive a little bit deeper into who we are as humans, maybe a little bit of the struggles that we’ve had running the business, and we hope it’s both fun and educational. Tommy, let’s do it, man. Third episode of the day. This is January 14th, 2025. And I think this is our last one for the day, unless we’re really feeling good about ourselves after this one.

Tommy Blackburn: We’ll see. I think we’ve got adrenaline and endorphins and momentum going at the moment. So we’re feeling good. We’re having fun. Thank you, everyone, our audience, for being with us today. Just since we mentioned, we’ve recorded some other episodes so far today. We’ve covered Medicare for 2025 and some updates there and just general knowledge.

And then we also just talked about WEP and GPO being eliminated. So we’re crossing topics here today, maybe Medicare and Social Securities related. Now we want to talk about what we think is applicable and maybe even set shows that we take our own medicine. And that is us having a business coach and consultant ourselves.

And the reason I say it’s us taking our own medicine is just like clients hire an advisor to have a partner, to have somebody who can do some of the doing and the thinking with and for them and have that objective third party, that’s what we’ve realized too. And you’ve probably heard us say, and hopefully, John, you say it too, but the firm has said it for a long time.

I’ll say it, but it’s certainly not—it didn’t start with me. The saying was, “You only live and die once, we do it a hundred times.” That’s why we can bring so much expertise and perspective to a financial plan. And we saw it. And when our conversation with Brian Gay about Medicare and him dealing with Medicare all the time, John and I and our firm, and Mason & Associates, the advisors, we have a lot of Medicare knowledge.

Way more than we would dare say, most advisors, let alone most individuals going through their plan. Then you talk to Brian, who’s done it 20,000 times. He’s seen scenarios we haven’t seen. So again, that’s the value of having an advisor and a partner. And the same goes with running a business, and that’s where we are, is we’ve done it quite well ourselves, just like our clients have done quite well navigating their plans on their own for a while, but you reach a point where you think it’d be nice to have another set of eyes, some other perspective, somebody who can step back and think about it without being in it at quite as much.

And who has also done this a hundred times with other businesses, it’s ultimately our decision to make that’s never gonna change. Just like clients, it’s their decision and their plan, but we’re just trying to bring in an outside perspective that’s seen this across many different firms or businesses that don’t even have to be a financial advising business, but can just bring a new perspective to help lighten the load and give us some confidence.

John Mason:Yeah, a co-pilot, somebody to come alongside us, and you only live, retire, and die once. This is hopefully the only business that you and I are probably ever going to build together. And we’ve thought about this, and I don’t know that we can actually quantify it, but there’s a point in time, Tommy, where your tax returns gotten overly complex, where you probably want to consider leaving TurboTax and going into hiring a professional and then your financial plan probably reaches that as well.

We can’t always say a million dollars means complexity, but like generally speaking, like if you’re in or near retirement and you’ve amassed over a million dollars and you’re gonna about to start taking distributions and you have to apply for Social Security and Medicare and we need to make sure your surviving spouse is taking care of you’ve probably reached a point of complexity where hiring a coach makes sense.

For us as business owners, we have read on Reddit. We’ve listened to podcasts, we’ve done all the same things that our audience is doing right now, listening to this podcast, and that’s what’s gotten us to this wonderful business where we serve a little over 400 families. We have five lead advisors, three rockstar team members.

But we keep producing content and we keep getting more clients throughout the United States, and we need more infrastructure in place. Maybe we could benefit from some lead advisors. We have to build it. We have to continue to build and iterate. And then I kind of liken it to a 60-year-old client approaching retirement.

Like we’ve made this transition from a mid-career professional that’s about to retire. That’s where we are in our business. We went from mid-career professional to this new phase of complexity and thinking that we can go at it alone, I think was not a good idea, which is I’m glad we’re not going at it alone anymore.

But then also, we had a wonderful lunch meeting, Tommy, yesterday with a student from Virginia Tech, and one of the things that we said is we love that we can give our clients confidence and that they don’t feel like they need to look at the stock market every day. They don’t feel like they need to look at their financial plan every day.

They know they’ve outsourced some of the thinking, but not the decision making. Frankly, you and I live and breathe this business so much. We’re worrying about clients’ financial plans, and we’re worried about the direction of the business, and we never get a point to just relax. We don’t ever really get a point where there’s not some worry, whether it’s a client worry or a personal worry or a business worry.

So I’m very excited to have a coach to do some of that worrying for us or give me the freedom to say, “John, you’ve accomplished enough in 2025.” We’re good, bro. You’re done. You don’t need to do anything more in 2025. There’s many more years to come. That’s what we would say to a client like, bro, we’ve done enough.

Like we’ve, we crushed it this year. I need somebody to talk me down and this coach is gonna be helpful, I think.

Tommy Blackburn: I agree. So we’re very excited about it just because we wear a lot of hats and we think we do it well, but you just get to a point. Like in, I imagine clients as you’re getting ready to retire, where there’s just, you can make mistakes and recover from them most of the time.

Sometimes you can’t, but it is nice to bring in some additional resources, some additional perspective to help us try to get this right the first time and help distill it all down. I think that’s what it comes down to is you have the do-it-yourself financial planners, which can work it.

It absolutely can, but there’s a lot that you have to digest, you have to learn, and then being able to sift through the noise to actually knowing what’s right, and you’re only doing this once or twice. Same thing with us hiring a coach. So again, we’re taking our own medicine of we’ve read a lot of business practice books.

We think we get a good deal of it. We’ve implemented a lot over the years, but we’re just getting to a point of it’s time. The firm is at a place where it’s time to invest some additional resources into this and help us distill and cut down on all of the spinning of wheels we have to do to keep moving forward.

That should really, I think, just give us a more straight line of—the coach can say to us or the consultant, both roles of, “I too have read these books and I’ve implemented ’em a hundred times, whereas you’re implementing it for the first time. And let me just distill it down to what really matters. And I’ve worked with other firms and you guys are very unique in this way. So I can tell you that these other five things aren’t gonna work for you, but these two probably will.”

And that’s what we’re excited about. And hopefully it’s not just about us. So we wanted to drive home the message that our principles of financial planning apply to us. We’re hiring advice and also hopefully give encouragement.

I think it’s apparent throughout the podcast episodes, but we continually invest in the business. And this is one of many ways that we’ve done it over the years, but this is the latest one and we’re excited about it. So we wanted to share it with our audience that we’re excited about this investment, which it may even take some time to see the full benefit of it, which most things in life are like that. It takes some time.

Just like a plan. And part of it is our coach consultant that we’ve hired is busy because they’re in demand, and they want to devote the time to us. That’s necessary for a good experience. So we probably won’t even really get going. We’ll probably get started soon. But as far as like really full force, getting the full benefit, probably not till this summer from the sounds of it.

Oddly enough, John, as I say it out loud, this sounds a lot like how we work with clients, right? Like here is our roadmap to success. Here’s our process, and we try to control our capacity. We try to control when we take things on with clients because we want the best experience and we wanna get it right.

John Mason: No doubt. And overconfidence gap. I think sometimes, I pick on the previous generation of men before us, they’re the ones who think they can fix their own golf swing and never have to stop and ask for directions and don’t necessarily see the value in a coach. I think you and I are a little bit different and our generation at 37 years old, but we certainly don’t have an overconfidence gap.

I think we’ve been able to identify some areas of weakness. So for instance, like are Tommy and John really good at launching a hiring campaign across the United States to find the best lead advisor? Probably not. Am I a great interviewer to determine will somebody integrate well into our operations management team?

No, I’m not good at any of that stuff, and so we’ve come to a point in our business where we’ve had to identify what we’re really good at. So we have clients that have put people on the moon or sent people to outer space. That doesn’t mean they understand tax law, just because Tommy, you and I have built this business along with Mike and Ken and Ben and Bobby, and our entire team.

Just because we’ve built the business to this point doesn’t mean that we have the skillset on our own to build it to the next point without help. And ironically, I was looking at the fee that we’ll be paying our new coaching consultant and when you look at it as a percentage of revenue, you know what we’ll be paying, it doesn’t look so different than an asset under management fee that clients would be paying a financial advisor, which is fascinating.

Tommy Blackburn: It’s almost like a universal calculation there of what advice is worth based upon the size of an asset to a degree. That is fascinating.

John Mason: So future developments for the firm, Tommy, would be we’re looking for an operations person, one or more probably people on the operations team. That’s gonna be a central focus. We want to fine tune our onboarding process for hiring new folks. We probably want a new lead advisor or two to help handle new clients that are coming in as well as serve existing families.

And then start building out some infrastructure probably as we look into the future audience, we want to enhance the podcast. We wanna do more on YouTube. We want to keep doing our marketing and our branding and everything that we’re doing well. And we’re gonna need some help building out that infrastructure.

And I’m currently reading Admiral McRaven’s book. It’s calledThe Hero Code, Tommy. So he has a list of things that embody true heroes, and I’ll just read them off to the audience. One is Courage: taking action despite fear. Humility: recognizing your limitations and not taking yourself too seriously.

Sacrifice: putting the needs of others before your own. Integrity: acting ethically and morally in all situations. Compassion: showing kindness and empathy towards others. Perseverance: not giving up in the face of challenges. Duty: fulfilling your responsibilities. Hope : inspiring optimism in others. Humor: to uplift and connect with others. And forgiveness: to let go of grievances and choosing to move forward.

I’m not saying that you and I are heroes. I’m not saying that Mason & Associates is a hero, but as I read through that list and I think about hiring the coach and I think about what clients have to do to hire a financial planner, we have to go through some of these, and we have to be able to have courage and humility and sacrifice and integrity.

Like all of this goes into the choice to hire a coach, the choice to outsource, the choice to trust a financial planning firm. And so to me, it was really resonating as I’ve been going through the book.

Tommy Blackburn: Yeah I think those are a great attributes to have and big decisions as well.

So I have to add that to my reading list among the many that I’m trying to get caught up on right now. So you’re crushing it. Constantly feeding me new books that I need to take a look at when I get a chance. I was thinking John, too, about, it’s funny, like businesses have to evolve and things have to—

It’s like a blueprint, a building plan. Many things in life, right? Like you have the plan, but you still have to go through certain steps. You usually can’t skip it, right? So that’s just where we are. This is why we haven’t had it before. We’ve had to grow for this to make sense. We’re there, but ultimately this is all capitalism, right?

Of just I was thinking what got this going was the NASA thought of, we have people who put others on the moon and vehicles on the moon as a very simple example. It’s not that they can’t understand financial planning or the tax code, it’s that their time and when they were working was either best spent where they enjoyed doing NASA-type work, that’s where their mind was.

And so you just delegate things. You outsource it. And that’s what everybody can be very good at certain things to come to a greater good versus trying to do it all yourself. And sure, they could probably understand it in retirement if they really put their mind to it, but who wants to put that amount of time and effort into it?

So it’s not that people can’t—just you and I could probably go study all the practice management constantly, stop all of our other responsibilities and be very good at it. But it just doesn’t make sense. So it’s just another examples of really, I would say the beauty of capitalism of, “Hey, I’m gonna continue doing what I’m very good at.

And ultimately, this is our firm, it’s our decisions to make, but you’re really good at helping us think through the next steps to take this to a level we’re not familiar with, to build out that infrastructure,” and it’s a far more efficient and cost effective to just bring your expertise in than us try to bootstrap everything.

John Mason: You and I talked a lot towards the end of last year about decision fatigue. And we were looking at new software programs that could enhance our meeting notes. We’re looking at ways to develop efficiencies. We’re thinking about switching our email archiving system.

And you reach a point where you can’t make any decision because you’ve made so many. I forget the stats, but like a human is only capable of making so many decisions in a day.

Tommy Blackburn:It takes energy. Yeah, it does exhaust you.

John Mason:So then you reach decision fatigue and then you start like self-sabotaging and you’re like, “Well, okay if I can’t do all of this, maybe I should just sell the business. Or if I can’t do this, maybe we just won’t implement any artificial intelligence.”

You just start making decisions for the wrong reasons. And what I’m getting at is by hiring this coach and this consultant and this unbiased third party, I think we’re going to see a lot of benefits in that we’re gonna be able to segment our business work from our client workload.

And we’ll have a better understanding of how we’re gonna balance that. I think we will have an unbiased third party who will help us decide what’s important versus what’s unimportant. Like actually rate and rank priorities. Help us make some decisions or reduce the number of decisions that we have to make throughout the year.

John Mason:Help us execute.

Tommy Blackburn:Help us execute so that we’re freed up to actually make decisions that matter. And I feel if you’re a person listening to this podcast, and you’re close to retirement, and you’re feeling like you have a lot of decisions in your financial plan or you’re feeling some of this decision fatigue where maybe you’re like self-sabotaging your financial plan or you’re sticking your head in the sand and you’re like I’m not gonna rebalance my portfolio right now ’cause I don’t want to think about how to do that.

Or I’m not gonna do a Roth conversion ’cause I don’t have time to invest in thinking why that would make sense. Or I’m just gonna apply for social security at 62, because that seems easier than coming up with a distribution strategy on how I’m gonna get to 70. Folks, that’s all self-sabotaging, and that is exactly what we face in our business too. Do you want financial planners that just make the easy decision because it’s easy? Or do you want somebody that’s going to invest in helping you do the hard things? So again, just trying to, Tommy, share with our audience and give some perspective on how some of the easy things in their financial plan versus easy things in running a business, and why we’re looking for that outside counsel.

Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, I think it’s great. I think we’ve done a pretty good job of sharing this with our audience and clients. I’m trying to think if there’s much else to share. I think it’s the Japanese, and we’ve already hit it, but I think it was the Japanese where Kaizen (continuous improvement) and hopefully that’s a big message here that we’re heading on is Mason & Associates is absolutely about continuous improvement.

And I only chuckle because I think I said on a previous podcast, I have clients, I have family that will ask me ’cause as John said, we live this business and be an advisor, so it’s always on our mind and folks around you who care about you ass “Hey, what’s going on with the firm these days?”

And I chuckle now is it’s like, what’s not going on? So we are certainly, we do not just sit around and rest on our laurels. We’re constantly improving it, and we really think this is gonna help us streamline that improvement. And if not, it’s not a decision that can’t be recovered from.

So we’re excited about it and we have reason. We interviewed a lot of people to get down to this answer, so we feel confident and many that we respect and we think are running good practices. As we looked behind the curtains, found out that, “Oh, you too went through this process that we’re now going through.”

So we think we’re doing great. Have a great firm, but this is gonna help us make it even better, which should ultimately benefit us, our team, and our clients.

John Mason: Tommy, let’s share a little bit with the audience. Continuing in the direction of the firm. Maybe we can link to the new client process and experience and what people can know about us.

We’re very transparent on here and how we charge our fees and how much we cost and the service we provide. So let’s link to Episode 20. Let’s link to some other things that talk about strategic planning meeting season. Folks, we are—So I’m gonna be very careful, Tommy, in this message because you’re not allowed, at least in the broker dealer world, where we used to be, you couldn’t send out an advertisement that said, “Come to a dinner seminar and learn about social security. Space is limited.”

That was like frowned upon. And I remember that from compliance training. You weren’t allowed to urge people through attendance based on scarcity mentality and…

Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, that’s because somebody abused it in the past. That’s how he got there.

John Mason:For sure. So we’re gonna be very close to—we’re gonna walk a thin line here, I think, Tommy, but we serve 400 families.

We have five advisors, and we have capacity to serve more families. Eventually, with the current infrastructure, we will run out of room to continue to say yes to new families. So then the decision is how do you continue to grow? How do you continue to help federal employees across the country go through these things as like our mission and what we like doing.

And the way you can continue to help more people is by hiring. So we are going to work very hard to find the right people in the right seats with the right mentality. That can continue the thing that you and I are building every day, but if we don’t start working with a coach until June, we may not hire a next lead advisor until 2026, or we may not find that next person until 2027.

So I just wanna share with the audience that we’ve done this in the past. Where we’ve had to put new potential clients on a waiting list. And the reason that we’ve put folks on a waiting list, Tommy, was that we wanted to really protect the onboarding process. We want to create a phenomenal experience and we wanna make sure that our team is ready to do all the things that we say we’re gonna do at the highest level.

If our firm ever reaches a point where we don’t believe we can do that for new families, that’s when we are going to start a wait list. So this is not meant to say, if you’re thinking about joining or thinking about calling us for an appointment, you better do it now ’cause a wait list is coming. I think our intention or our goal, Tommy, would be that maybe we don’t necessarily ever need the wait list, but we’ve got that in our back pocket to—most important—preserve the service that we’re providing to existing families.

Tommy Blackburn:That’s where my mind—yeah, that’s number one goal is we want to maintain the relationships and the service for our existing families.

John Mason: And as long as we can do that, if we can grow and do that, then that’s great. If that means growth has to stall out a little bit so we can continue to uphold our commitment, then that’s what we’re gonna do.

That’s when the wait list comes in handy. But certainly we’re gonna try and build out the infrastructure over the next X number of months so that doesn’t have to happen. But if it does, wait lists don’t last forever and that won’t be a forever thing. So my hope, Tommy, the audience just takes away from this, that we’re very protective over our client experience and very transparent about how we see this thing growing over time.

Tommy Blackburn: Yeah. No, I think it’s great. I hope it’s a hopeful message too, that, we treasure, we take our service dear to heart. We’re gonna take care of our existing clients, and we can only do that by an advisor serving—I mean, you can only have so many relationships and do it well. Technology helps, having some other resources around you help.

There are ways to certainly make yourself more efficient and we try to utilize that as much as we can, but yeah, we see the future what we believe to be the future and invest. We need to grow. And we don’t want to do it wrong, so it’s gonna take time. And if we use a wait list, it’s not any scarcity tactic.

It is really just a tool to help us manage the situation so that it continues to, first and foremost, be good for our existing clients and our existing team so that we can grow in a healthy positive way so that new clients also get to enjoy that and new team members as well.

John Mason: That’s awesome. I guess one other kind of quick update for those of you who are listening to this on your podcast feed, whether it’s Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen, and we’re also on YouTube and we’ve asked our marketing company to enhance the level of service that they’re providing to us.

So we’ve got some new YouTube thumbnails, Tommy, that have come out that I think look pretty cool. So we’ve kinda scaled up what we’re doing on YouTube. It’s not just like us like. And then doing funny faces or something like, we’ve got some cool artwork and also producing some YouTube shorts from these episodes.

So trying to pull out three or four one-minute segments from each episode that kind of capture the purpose or the message and distill it down into one-minute bite-sized clips. So if you haven’t ventured over from the podcast to YouTube, you may wanna do that. ’cause I think it’s cool what YouTube allows you to do on the podcast side of things.

Tommy Blackburn: It is. Thank you for sharing it. ’cause it has been a fun development, exciting development for us. And we’re also working on a website refresh and hope to have that, hopefully that’ll be out by spring—is our hope. I guess don’t hold it to, I know we’ll most likely deliver that, but we will just see what happens. Sometimes things get slowed down, particularly as you try to get it right. But that is certainly in the works as well.

John Mason: So much going on here. So much positive stuff. Tommy, thank you for another great episode of the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.

Tommy Blackburn: Thank you, sir. It’s been a blast. Look forward to hearing from our audience. We hope you’re enjoying it.

John Mason: Yes. Audience, clients, thank you for being on the journey. Three years strong. If you would do all the things for us, and also, we’re looking for new contents as well. So we’ve got some potential guests that we’re thinking about bringing on: an attorney from California.

We’re actually thinking about bringing on a potential client to come on and like share experiences that they’ve had working with our firm, maybe a doctor to talk about some functional medicine. So we have ideas on how we want to continue to grow.

This podcast is not just reading you an OPM handbook every two weeks. But if there’s questions for you, we’re gonna dive into Reddit. We’re gonna see what y’all are talking about on the Reddit forums, and we’re gonna try and bring some of that to life. But if you have questions, if you have specific topics that you wanna see us discuss, shoot us a comment on any of these videos on YouTube.

Send us an email to masonfp@masonllc.net. And if you’re interested in becoming a client. You can do that masonllc.net or start the process by calling our phone number (757) 223-9898. Folks, thank you again for being with us. Remember, we’re financial planners first, and we do this second.

We’re here to support, empower, educate, and motivate you to make positive changes in your financial plan. Thanks for being with us on the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.

The topics discussed on this podcast represent our best understanding of federal benefits and are for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment, financial planning, or other professional advice.

We encourage you to consult with the office of personnel management and one or more professional advisors before taking any action based on the information presented.

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