I was in Tahoe this weekend and a close friend of mine drove up to snowboard with me. This friend has a company much like One Wealth Advisors, albeit a bit smaller than us and he, as CEO of his company, is a bit younger than I thus creating a somewhat natural mentor/mentee relationship between us. Many of our discussions on the ski lift and over meals tended to be around how to manage our respective firms and how defined and organized we wanted them to become as we grow.
Over the past few years, our company has become increasingly more defined in terms of departments, job titles, job descriptions, and overall goals and objectives. My friend was impressed, but he was also resistant to considering incorporating these types of things into his company. Initially, I tried to argue my case as to why he should, but eventually he shut me up and explained to me that one of the things that he loves about running his company is how he and his team members get to wear lots of “hats” in their far less defined roles. It made me think about how big of a company I would like to have One Wealth become. I, too, love wearing more than a few hats, and the bigger we get, the less hats we all get to wear. Will we become bureaucratic? Less fun and creative? I am not sure of the answer.
I do know that we have not put any emphasis on sales and marketing, our theory being that if we focus all of our energy on providing top tier service, our clients will do the selling for us by referring us to those in their network. This strategy has proven effective, as evidenced by our growth. I love what we came from and what we have become, but at what point are we no longer what we love? My hope in sharing these thoughts is to remind myself and my team to make sure we never get too big and to never stop being fun and creative. Maybe this means to never allow the company to get to the point where each of us can only wear one hat.
