Hey it's Josh Brown. My guest this week on the compound mini podcast is Joe Duran,

founder of United Capital who joined me at Wealthstack in Scottsdale, Arizona last week to talk about his

impending sale to Goldman Sachs, his career, what it means to be happy,

what it means to retire, and how financial advisors should be thinking about building their

businesses today.

I hope you enjoy it.

Where do you see the state of the industry going over the next 10 years?

What are the major things that advisors in this room should be thinking about as they continue to build and grow their own businesses?

So I wrote a couple of years ago that I thought we were at the end of the golden era for the independent firm.

And that didn't mean that I thought it was going to end.

It just meant that the easy picking was done.

If you were an independent firm four or five years ago, ten years ago, the competition was so awful from the big brokerage firms that you could deliver at 1%, you were charging half as much as the competition.

You could be open architecture, the competition was all proprietary product, and you could

do planning and none of the competition was doing planning and they were hardly any independent

firms.

So you had a massive advantage that really from the time I entered the business in the early 90s

until about 2016-2017 you had Greenfield. The biggest dilemma now is that's

no longer true. There are a lot of independent firms you type in wealth

management in your neighborhood you will be flooded with alternatives. When you go to those websites, they will look the same. Every client is getting the same thing. Some form of financial plan, an open market nature portfolio of ETS and mutual funds

and the only real difference is the people who are delivering it.

In that world your biggest competition is going to be how do you grow? How do you choose to grow?

I would suggest Scholl mentioned earlier that the pricing fraudiness we're seeing is a large

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