March 17, 2025 • 40 mins
Forget the outdated concept of retirement! Wealth management veteran Russ Hill (with 55 years of industry wisdom) shares game-changing strategies for business owners who want more than just a long life—they want a purposeful, profitable one. Drawing from his 96-year-old travel agent mother's inspiring journey and Stanford's innovative "road atlas" for life planning, Russ reveals how today's entrepreneurs can build businesses that support their health, wealth, and legacy. This conversation delivers practical wisdom on:
- Creating business transitions that preserve your purpose and passion
- Protecting your most valuable business asset (your health) through strategic lifestyle investments
- Building age-diverse teams that blend wisdom with technical innovation
- Establishing financial foundations that support longevity without sacrificing quality of life
- Leveraging continuing education to stay competitive in rapidly evolving markets
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Grow, Sell and Retire is the podcast for the lazy overachiever.
Bad Dalton, author of the assistant Purchase, True Gravity and Grow,
Sell and Retire, is here to give his twenty five
years of secrets, tips and assistants to take your business
to the next level. This podcast is for anyone who
wants to sell more, work less and make better business.
(00:24):
Now here's your host, bead with Today's GSR podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello, everybody, Beady Dalton here Grows, Sell and Retire podcast.
Really excited about today's show. I have Russ Hill with me,
but I'm going to kind of introduce him for a
second because I kind of see Russ Hill as the chairman.
I've got books set in front of me, including one
from Coach, one from Laura Carsonsen, one from Tim Noonan
one from Jeff Belcora, but essentially huge amounts of people
(00:54):
that have all been brought together by Russ and now
he's written his book Optimizing Longevity. So we're going to
talk today. So Russ, welcome to the program and looking
forward to talking to you. So tell us a little
bit about you and your background.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Sure, thanks, b D. Glad to be here. So I've
been in the business of what we now call wealth
management for now fifty five years, so I'm getting an
edge of understanding it. I started back when it was
backly a brokerage company and turn it into financial planning
(01:30):
and then wealth management, and it's really been a lot
of fun. And I think in terms of the book
Optimizing Longevity, but the whole idea of longevity is if
you can figure out something that you like to do
and you keep doing it, that's a great way to
live a longer and healthier life because you're doing something
(01:52):
with purpose. So we just yesterday were noticed that for
the I think sixth or eighth year in a row
I can't remember which, we rated one of the best
places to work in the United States and financial services.
And actually our CEO's compensation depends on continuing to win
those kinds of awards. We we like that a lot,
(02:16):
and it's it's been a lot of fun. So I'm
looking forward to our conversation today. I don't know much
about UK rules in terms of finance. I know there's
some differences in some similarities. But so I step off
off a curb and running in front of an oncoming car,
I didn't look left or whatever it was.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
I love good no today, but really it's more talking
about less about the financial side and more about what
people should plan for in their life. When you talk
about it and optimizing longevity is it's it's not the
old thing is so used to be. We would we
would look at retirement as a as a gold watch
in a sixty five and you're out the door. You're
(03:00):
a little bit older than sixty five.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
And I don't even remember sixty five.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
That's classic. But it used to be that. So when
you first started off, what did you I mean, because
it's all fifty five years in this industry and everything
else and helping other people retire and do whatever they did.
What does it look different now for you than you
thought it would when you started in the industry or
in business.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I think I think, like most people, yeah, it wasn't
so much a gold watch because I've pretty much developed
my own business and worked for myself, so you got
to you got a gold watch for a big company.
But realistically, you know, retirement was sort of invented in
this last century. Toward the middle of last century, we
didn't really have retirement. People worked and you know, and
(03:49):
then social Security in the US came in, and I
know a post war in UK dif different systems came in.
So we really thought of it as as a time
to sort of relax. And I think I think most people,
myself included, probably had sort of a golden haze. You know,
you thought, Okay, I'm gonna have sixty five and then
things will be great and I'll go on for a
(04:10):
little while. In my particular case, further along, I mean,
this isn't when I started, but my old mother. I
don't know if I ever told you this story. My
mother decided to go to work when she was sixty five.
She never had worked. My dad didn't want her to work. Wow,
she wanted to become a travel agent. And she became
(04:30):
a travel agent and worked from age sixty five to
age ninety six, on which she died two weeks after
she quit working and made sure that her everybody she
had opened had had their trips planned, and then she
went off. So her mother died at one hundred and one,
learning Spanish in case she needed it someday.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Wow, that's in case you did.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
I had a little different view of what longevity might
do in that regard. I do think the important thing,
and the shift has been that life isn't linear anymore.
You know, you'd go to school, you'd work for the
same employer, and you'd retire as you said, you a
gold watcher or whatever the equivalent was for you. And
that's clearly not the case anymore. And the origin of
(05:19):
the book was actually work done at the Stanford Center
on Longevity, the sort of relevant I think to a
lot of your a lot of your listeners, uh. And
the idea was, when you're thinking of longevity as the
way I think you should think of it, which is lifetime,
it's not just post retire but it's not just aging.
(05:41):
It's it's what happens with early childhood education, what happens
with early training and learning, what happens with multiple jobs.
When you think of it that way, we used I
used the analogy of a road. ATA was the actual
new map of life that came out of Stanford was
for policymakers. It was for people to think about what
(06:01):
we needed to change in terms of education and laws
and all that sol and I wanted to make it
a little bit how an individual would take these same
ideas and think about those different areas. So it was
to give context to longevity instead of just thinking, oh boy,
I'm going to live longer. And I think for most
of us, certainly for me, I'm much less concerned with
(06:25):
the length of life than with the quality of life
and the quality of health. And you know, they say
now that a lot of the researchers in medicine are
targeting being healthy up until two weeks before death, and
I said, I would prefer twenty minutes, but two weeks
I'll take it. You know, if you can have a
(06:47):
relatively healthy life and do a lot of the things
you want to do, whether it's post retirement or shifting
your retirement, that's really that's really the goal.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, definitely, But when you're when you're starting to plan that.
So if we go to the you have the business
owner point of view, So if you put both hats on.
For me, is the business owner point of view. And
now you've moved into this chairman role and you've put
a CEO in place, and you've put in systems and
things like that, what are some things from the business
(07:21):
owner point of view? And then the other side for
me is what are people need to be thinking about
as business owners talking to their professionals, their their their
financial advisors, things like that. So if we go first
from the business owners still wanting to have possibly their
their name on a spot, engaged in board meetings and
things like that, what are some transitions that people are
(07:43):
getting wrong by fully retiring. Possibly?
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, I think if your audience is mostly the people
who are the founders and primary owners of businesses, yes,
then then they have the opportunity to guide the business
in a way that works for them, which I started
doing a couple of decades ago actually, And to me,
(08:09):
that means you're thinking about do you really enjoy the
business or aspects of what aspects do you enjoy about
the business and what you don't like. So very early
on I decided things I didn't like and I gave
them to other people to do, but also retained enough
influence and control that I get to decide now what
(08:29):
I want to do. That takes a long time to
get them. So for the business owner, I'm going to
go to the second part of your question because it's related.
I think it's a very good idea to talk to
professionals about all sorts of things like what is it
that you really want to do? I know you provide coaching,
(08:50):
and that really isn't a critical part to think about
what do you want to do? What does your spouse
want to do? It is a pretty good idea to
get out of the way early because you know who's
in charge, yes, and so if you get those early on,
you can you can begin to guide the business structure
and your succession planning or if you're going to sell,
(09:11):
or whatever you're going to do to to leave you
the room to do what you want to do. If
you haven't thought about what it is you want to do,
that that is unlikely to work out in the best
possible way. So that's why I think looking at in
context and and and in the what I call the
(09:33):
off ramps, and you've thought about as pit stops along
the road, what you really want to do is when
whenever you're coming up to one of those, you really
want to look around and see who's actually done this before. Uh.
Sometimes these off ramps are unintended things like divorce or
bad health or family issues that but there are counselors
(09:56):
that they've been there before. You know, the first thing
you should be doing is looking for people who have
actually done this before. Maybe they're professionally attuned to things
and they can help you. Don't. Don't try to go
through it by yourself. And so whether it's financial or emotional,
or health or anything else. And I think it's very
(10:18):
clear that as longevity continues to increase, particularly for well
educated and or upper income people, it's actually it might
be interesting to know it's actually education more than income.
But as that continues continues to develop, you really have it.
(10:41):
At the traditional retirement age of call it sixty five
or early sixties, whatever it is, you probably have thirty years.
And frankly you might even have more. Now we don't
know all these new treatments and wonder stuff. Most of
that's kind of hot air. Still there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of it, and some of it's real.
So it's going to allow you to be healthy, I believe,
(11:05):
a longer. So what do you want to do with
that time?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
And so you've you've done. Those are great from a
professional point of view. When you were asking people and
you you and I both dealt a lot with Belcorra,
Jeff Belcoora, and so what what do you think some
better questions that people either can ask of themselves or
can ask their spouse.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
If somebody asked them. Yeah. Yeah, well, as you know,
with the Jeff's system, and we actually we actually have
in the Journal of Financial Planning, there's an article I
was in fifteen, I think that's right, which is in
how you ask these questions and it's based on us
(11:50):
and the interesting part of this to get to these
issues in what Jeff actually came up with and as
you as you will know, it came from cancer patients
at UCSF and the idea that if you if you
went into a doctor and you've got a diagnosis of
a dread disease, particularly cancer, that you really couldn't hear
(12:13):
what the physician was saying to you. You probably didn't
know the words anyway, but I mean you really couldn't
listen to it. So they started by having medical students
go to the meetings with you, et cetera, et cetera.
What we found out in asking questions is one it
is better to do it with somebody over the phone
(12:36):
than in person. And the reason for that is you're
not taking physical cues when you're even when you're on zoom,
I can see you and I can see whether you're
responding to what I'm saying, but whether you're responding is
not really what I'm thinking necessarily. And so if you
do this over the phone and you do the triage
(12:58):
that Jeff talks about, which is asking questions and going
deeper than saying is there anything more than doing this
again and again, you really get to a much deeper understanding.
And what we found is that people, and particularly doing
it together with spouses one a lot of times spouses
have never really talked about what they really want to
(13:20):
do other than in you know, it'd be nice to
have a second home or nice to go sailing or whatever,
but they haven't really gone through what all the implications better,
what are the financial implications, what are the family indications?
So you want to sail around the world, but you
have relatives who are not in good health and you
(13:43):
don't want to leave them. If you had that discussion, well,
if you go through this in detail, you'll get there. Yeah.
So it's not an easy process and it's kind of
funny that and it's iterative, as you well know, you
have to go back and forth and you have to
think about this for a long time and you get
to know people better. But that's why financial planning today
(14:06):
is not not really that simple. It's not a straight line,
and it's not just the people you're talking to, it's
their whole extended family.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
You've been million in this. But I think one of
the best things I read in this not best, but
one of the things that's really hit home recently of
lots of people losing other people is health as an
asset and walking through so kind of you get people
to retire and go back to the sixty five model,
and then they were expected to die by sixty seven
(14:38):
according to Social Security, you know, so we only gonna
have to pay for him for two years. So you
get so many people, I'm sure Albert Hargrove, and we've
had it where people retire and then they actually can't
physically do anything because they've drained themselves so much. So
if we're now working till sixty, what's something that people
should be, oh, business owners and other peop people should
(15:00):
be building into their overall longevity plan.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Well, I think I think you hit on it in
the sense that as early as you think about it,
if it's not native to you, I mean, there are
people that obviously get into business who were let's say
they were athletes or something, and they continue to be athletes.
But leaving that aside, the sooner you think about health
(15:27):
being one of your primary assets. And for most people
up until the point when maybe they would have retired otherwise,
their biggest asset is in fact human capital, right, and
human capital goes away if you can't work and you
haven't kept up your learning those two things. So as
(15:48):
soon as you think about it, it starts your own
health program. And one of the things that I think is,
I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of
quackery and the business, but typically your grandmother was right.
You know, eat well, sleep enough, get enough exercise, and
(16:09):
don't worry an exercise about whether you get ten thousand
steps or seventy five hundred steps or some number that
somebody made up. By the way, those were all made
up numbers. I don't know if you know that the
ten thousand steps came from a weird thing in Japan
that people quoted and they thought it was science. But
it's not. So get up an exercise with my wife
(16:33):
and I made it. We're not quite sure. It might
be a terrible mistake. We just got a puppy about
fourteen months ago. She's killing us, killing us, But I
mean we're up every morning at six o'clock. I'd take
the dog out, you know. And so if I were
thinking about being lazy and staying in bed, it just work.
(16:55):
I think that's a critical thing. And a lot of
people think, well, you know, fifty five, I'm not going
to be I'm not going to be an athlete again.
It's not relevant. Go take a walk, get off the couch.
Make little changes in your diet. You know. You don't
have to change everything, and you don't have to eat
all green vegetables and never have any meat again or
(17:18):
anything like that. Just you'll be reasonable and your health
can improve a lot. And with a lot of this,
particularly some of the you know, the current wonder drug
are these weight loss drugs which now in fact seem
to have all positive side almost all positive. Sometimes they
affect a digestion, but they're actually getting cleared by the
(17:41):
FDA for cardiac treatment, actually improve heart function.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, it's amazing, and it's it's all good stuff. So
you've got a chance with a lot of this coming
out that that will be helpful. But what you can
do yourself is reasonably try to improve on all these
areas where you know, think about your sleep habits, think
about how I hate to say, is how much you drink.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
That's a tough one. We know how much we we
know how much we drink. Is it supposed to be
the limiting the amount or is it yet?
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Well? Yeah, but you now be reasonable in fact, and
also for business owners, step back and think analytically about
what you read. I'll take the drinking as one of them.
It turns out, of course that red wine isn't necessarily
(18:38):
good for you, but it's a little bit bad for
you unless you, you know, drink an enormous amount. But
if you look at the statistics, you have to actually
read the statistics, which the newspapers usually don't get right,
because while it increases your risk of all cause mortality,
it increases it by four or five percent from a
(18:58):
very low level, a very low level. But the headline
always says it's bad for you.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Well, not really, and it could it could double your
chance of heart disease. But that's going from four percent
to eight percent.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, still not even there's not even that much unless
you you know, of course, if you drink.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
A lot, if you do anything in excess, it can be.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Anything on action, that's right. And so you know, look
at those things. I actually read through and pay attention.
And you don't have to. You don't have to do
it all the time, but when you see something like
that that bothers you. The US has a great example
of something that was damaged to a lot of people,
and that was the use of hormones and its effect
(19:47):
on breast cancer. Okay, and millions of women didn't take
hormone treatments because it increased your risk of breast cancer,
except that it did literally increase it. They said twenty
five percent. It did increase the risk from a four
percent to a five percent chance. And so millions of
people had decades of discomfort or something that if they'd
(20:09):
known what that number meant, would have gone what Even
physicians don't I mean didn't know. I mean now they do,
but yeah, no, So you have to look through that
stuff and say, Okay, if I were going to walk
ten thousand steps a day, what happens if I walk
five thousand steps a day, what happens technically is you
(20:32):
get about eighty five to ninety percent of the benefit
of walking ten thousand steps.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
So then, like do you talk about in chapter seven,
and this is something near and dear to both of
our hearts, is building the financial security from the start.
So if somebody, somebody's listening to this and they're forty
years of age, and the thing that you and I
typically hate to hear when they say I'm going to
retire and you say where's your retirement plan? They say,
you're standing in it. You know, the family business or
(20:59):
the store or restaurant or whatever it is. So how
do people start building their foundations from the beginning to
start that even just savings or things like that. So
what should they be thinking about as a business owner?
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Well, I think there's two basic things, or two different
areas that you'd be thinking about. One is that all
the traditional stuff that we think about investing generally is true.
You start as soon as you can, you diversify, you
save relatively continuously, and you really want to start that,
(21:38):
even if it's at a very low level. The moment
you start thinking about it, you know, start contributing and
be diversified and don't try to hit a home run.
A lot of business owners tend to think and you
know as well as either the fallacy called the illusion
of control. They think if they're running something, it's going
(21:59):
to be good. You know, the risk isn't as high
for me because I'm doing it well. Not true. The
risk is still there, and so you want to continue
and diversify alongside building your company. Now, having said that,
it's easy to say, and many years ago, I borrowed
a lot of money to start this business and realize
(22:21):
how difficult it is, but you can still begin saving
something and the compounding effect, as you well know, the
compounding effect if you start at twenty five or thirty
or thirty five is enormous. So if you're forty and
you haven't started, start, let's start and use whatever you
can do tax wise in terms of if there are
(22:45):
are retirement plans that you put into the company, et cetera,
if you can't just good outside. The other thing that's
part of that, in my mind is that because human
capital is such an important part of your lifetime net worth,
(23:06):
the fact for most of us it's what actually creates
all of the networth that you have, you really have
to start thinking about protecting the human capital that you have.
How do you protect human capital while you do it
in two fundamental ways. One you have insurance or three,
(23:27):
let me make it three. You have insurance to the
extent you can have disability and life insurance and things
like that, long term care insurance. And I believe you
should use those as much as you can afford to
use them. I mean you have to balancing out. You
should have bigger reserves. Traditionally, financial planners always say, you know,
(23:49):
don't hold any cash because cash is a drag. How
many times do you hear in cash drag and investment?
I view cash and I think I said in the
book cash is an option premium. When you pay an
option premium, you expected the premium sometimes will expire worthless,
(24:11):
but on balance, you expect to make something from the
options over time. Right, Well, when bad things happen and
you have some cash, it really helps. So keep a
little bit more cash than people say. And then the
other thing, in terms of your human capital, continue to
learn throughout life. You have to keep up in whatever
(24:32):
field you're in, with whatever's going on, and it's going
to be easier and easier. You can do all this
through the internet. Now you've got artificial intelligence to help
you learn things, it's going to be easier and easier.
And because it's easier, other people are going to be
doing it. So if you want to be competitive when
you're seventy years old, you should be thinking about staying
(24:55):
current by using whatever. That could be the LITW University,
it could be the Internet, it could be however you
want to do it. But you have to stay up
with things. And you know, in our in my business,
I have continuing education requirements. Yes, actually fifty, there's three
(25:16):
different ones I have to do. I think it's sixty
hours a year of additional training. So they make you
go do this. It's very useful. I think it's great.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And so if you're if you're looking at people that
have gone longevity besides besides mom and grandma, So who
else do you kind of look up to or envy
that that are in your peers or other other people
that you that you could name.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Well, the classic is Warren Buffett. It's ninety four. Actually
I knew Charlie Munger. He died, you know, just just
at a at one hundred. I think. Well, in our
own firm was a small brokerage firm. We had people
(26:03):
that retired in the mid nineties when I was coming
up and I thought it was wonderful. You know, we're
still industry is still affected by ages, yes, clearly. And
you know the reality is that older workers are not
(26:27):
better or worse than younger workers. They're just different. They
may not have the same technical skills or the same
ability to pick up new things quickly, but what they
have is wisdom of having done bad things before. Hours
like to say, experience means something I don't have to
do again, right, and you know, it's very helpful. And
(26:52):
so what we have in our firm, for example, most
of our teams are pretty well aged diverse. We have
people in their early early seventies and people in their
late twenties working together on a client team, and they
do different things. But there if you have respect for
(27:13):
what the other person could do in the interaction, it's
it's really well. The demonstrations are that it actually works,
and so I think there's a lot of people there are.
Obviously in some industries. It's a lot easier if I
were if I were had a carry. I don't know
(27:35):
heavy stones. As a mason right now, I'm not sure.
Although I had a level that was a Mason until
he died of cancer. But he was a Mason until
he was seventy eight.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Wow, that's a that's a good.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Tough old guy.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So and so, when you were making the let's do
two transitions one the first time, when you started to
build the systems and the people and handing stuff off,
what was the hardest thing that you handed off? First?
If you remember back to the day that you said,
I this is hard like client work or what was
the hardest thing to let go of because it wasn't
Russ that was going to be doing it?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yeah, Yeah, for me, it was it was not hard
to hire to hand off the client work because they
got really good focus from the younger people who are there.
And I still I would meet with people a couple
of couple of long term clients asked if I are
still alive, but questionable the hardest thing to hand off? Well,
(28:46):
when do you start a business. And you know this
as well as I do. When you start a business,
you're probably you're probably able to do everything in that
business better than everybody else. You're the one that you know,
I could fix the copy machine and do all that,
and we rather quickly. You're decades ago got to the
(29:08):
places where I couldn't do that and you and that
was uncomfortable for a while. I mean I had to
give myself a good talking to on a couple of occasions,
just you know, get out of the way. Let somebody
else try to solve the problem. Recognize that they're very
likely to make some mistakes. But I was very likely
(29:30):
to make some mistakes too, So it's not like, you know,
if I'm going to do it, it's perfect. And getting
to that transition where you cannot do everything that everybody
else could do, and now we have a lot of
with our it guys and all of the technical stuff.
You know, I can turn my computer on, but I'm
not the guy to program things.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
And then if we're looking at it from the career
path sort of view, if you were to look back
at Russ's career path through helbro Grove and all the
other stuff, what would you have done differently? Not on
the handing stuff off to people, but like time at
work versus holidays, versus time studying versus sabbaticals. So what
(30:15):
would you have done differently on your road maps?
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Are you're atlas, I would have one thing would have
changed me although I have done the vacations and things
all along, and volunteers.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
I actually back in the early nineties, starting in the
early nineties, so that's a long time ago now started
doing a lot of volunteer work. So I've actually done
a quarter or a third of my time has been
on volunteer things. I've had some big, big projects in
the aquarium Long Beach, which is one of the largest
(30:52):
United States. Actually physically was in charge of building it,
even though I didn't know anything about aquarium. I didn't
have up until I was probably in my late forties.
I didn't have enough confidence in my own ability that
people would follow me. So we did a lot of
(31:15):
business deals with other people where we put money with them,
and finally I decided to do that internally and build
the firm internally, and that that was very helpful. I
made the commitment when when I started doing that, though,
that I was not going to not take vacations and
(31:38):
so so it was pretty interesting. Let's just say that
I was functionally functionally bankrupt is technically the right term.
But by borrowing money to start the business and and
and at leasting some very nice office pace and things
(32:00):
like that, and we would still take vacation. I'd spend
time with it. I never missed any of that. Our
son's athletic events, my daughter's drama, and you know, went
to all of those. I think you have to decide
what's important, and so I wouldn't have done that any differently.
I might have taken even more time. I'm not sure,
(32:23):
but I had to. I had to get that. I
had to get to that level where I ended up
with enough self belief. I call it in the book
self efficacy, and I think that's a that's the right
term comes from Albert van Dura, who liked to say
he was the fourth most quoted psychologist in the world,
and the other three were dead. Yes, he's a great guy,
(32:48):
but if you don't have self belief, you can't do anything.
If you do have it, you still have risks and
luck and probability and all that stuff. But you got
you got to have that first. And I should have
had more, but should have would have doesn't do it
and tells something happens and you decide you've got it,
(33:09):
and then then you decide you can do things. And
so I've started a lot of things since then, and
some of them worked. And some haven't.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
So two things now, So before as we wrap up,
why now did it take you this long to write
the book? When you sat around all these amazing authors
that you've brought through, worked on their things, been their
best friends, with Coach, with Tim, with bel Kora, with
all these people, why now?
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Why not? Well, I didn't actually set out to write
a book. I did, in fact, at the Stanford con
Cea on Longevity, I was the guy that instigated the
meeting that created There was actually a very large meeting
by invitation about fifty people from around the world and
(33:57):
some academic and a lot of business people to think
about the first round of the New Map of Life.
We weren't calling it that. And then I also instigated
the meeting a year later to begin to organize it,
and then we ended up at the center of Loegevity
actually hired nine PhDs to actually look at the different
(34:19):
areas and they studied it. So that was the project.
And then as that began to sort of marinate and
I started to think about it, I realized that, well,
excuse me. And when the New Map of Life came
out as published, there's a lot of academic stuff and
then there was a summary. The summary is about sixty
(34:40):
or seventy pages worth looking at. I hired a fellow
to do a graphic analysis of each domain. He was
a retired Irish lawyer living in Melbourne, Australia that considered
himself a storyteller, but he did graphic art. Yes, so
he created the graphics that are in the book, and
(35:03):
Stanford uses them as well. I just gave them, gave
it to them to use. So I realized I had
all this fundamental stuff, but it was it was more
at the policy level rather than something that our own
clients could read or would read. I mean, they all
the stuff was out there, but they wouldn't they wouldn't
do all that. But he decided to start putting it together,
(35:24):
and I wrote the first the introduction, and that that
that kind of thing that, well, I guess I have
to do the whole book, so sort of forced myself.
I didn't actually want to write a book.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
So fortunately, and going back to that overall, I mean,
and we met now almost a decade ago, but so
surrounding yourself with people that are in your industry, that
are surrounding that and all around the industry or all
around thoughts that you like, So meet once a year
do all this type of stuff. What can people do
(35:57):
to bring peers together that might cost them some time,
might cost them some money, might cost them some human capital,
but can expand their universe, their longevity and that type
of stuff. So what can people think about and do that.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
I know in our in our industry, we generally call
them study groups. But I think I think what you
can do almost any industry is meet some like minded
people and think about issues that you that affect all
of you, and you can create, uh A some way
(36:31):
of coming together. And you have to be willing to
provide value. And I think what that means is you
have to be willing to put in money, time effort,
I have to be willing to share. And what we
found in several of these different groups that that meet
is that people tend to be fairly open. They tend
(36:54):
to tell the truth, uh and and it's extremely valuable
to actually get that kind of feedback. So sometimes you
have to be geographically separated and you don't want to
be too competitive. You don't want to have a guy
that's got a shop right next to years maybe, but
but I think almost anybody can think about how to
(37:16):
put that together and you'll find most people are interested
in participating in the sense as you well know, because
you deal with business owners and leaders. When you're the
primary owner of the primary leader, who you talk to.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Nobody.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
You can't talk to many of the firm because they
work for you, and then you know they're compensation is
dependent on them, so you know, I mean, you can
talk to them, but let's they say you're not going
to get quite the straight scoop that you will talk
to another business leader. And so I'm sure you put
these people together sometimes, but I think that's that's extremely
valuable and when you get tired of being by yourself,
(37:58):
you can go talk to people. We actually had a
group that got it started in the early nineties. It
lasted for about ten years. There were four firms that
were similar to our firm, and we met and they
were spread around the country so we really didn't compete
and we would get together and you know, talk about anything.
(38:20):
And it was so valuable to do. And we could
call if you had an issue, call somebody to say, hey,
I've got this problem. What are you going to do? Well?
What did you do? And you get the right answer.
So I couldn't encourage people more to do that both
because the social interaction by itself is valuable. By the way,
(38:42):
it's very good for your longevity, yes, in that sense,
but it's really great for helping you do well in
your own business and having a good life. It's good
for your mental health. So keep your health.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Span going very good. So here's here's the moment, so
optimizing longevity, Russ Hill, the rewind moment. So drop one
thing here now that if somebody only listened to the
last minute, they would go crap. I want to rewind
and listen to the whole thing again. So what's what's
(39:16):
your what's your golden nugget? The golden nugget, I.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Would say this, rather than working on your money, working
on your health and your social relationships, because those are
those are the foundation of the money you have. Sure
you pay attention to the other things, but if you
do that first, you know your family, your health, you
(39:42):
can make them you can make the business part of
the money part come out.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
That's awesome, Russ, thank you so much for joining me
on the Growth Selling Retired podcast. It's been amazing.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
Thanks, it's been fun.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Thanks for joining us on Grow Sell and Retire For
more and tools, or to book one of our team
members to work with your team business, or to speak
at your event or conference. Visit rockfind dot co dot uk.
If you like the podcast, you'll love one of Bede's
three books, The Assistant Purchase True Gravity and the Book.
The podcast is based on, Grow, Sell and Retire. If
(40:20):
you want to work for the rest of your life,
that is your business. If you don't, that is ours.
Grow, Sell and Retire is the podcast for the lazy overachiever.
Bad Dalton, author of the assistant Purchase, True Gravity and Grow,
Sell and Retire, is here to give his twenty five
years of secrets, tips and assistants to take your business
to the next level. This podcast is for anyone who
wants to sell more, work less and make better business.
(00:24):
Now here's your host, bead with Today's GSR podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
Hello, everybody, Beady Dalton here Grows, Sell and Retire podcast.
Really excited about today's show. I have Russ Hill with me,
but I'm going to kind of introduce him for a
second because I kind of see Russ Hill as the chairman.
I've got books set in front of me, including one
from Coach, one from Laura Carsonsen, one from Tim Noonan
one from Jeff Belcora, but essentially huge amounts of people
(00:54):
that have all been brought together by Russ and now
he's written his book Optimizing Longevity. So we're going to
talk today. So Russ, welcome to the program and looking
forward to talking to you. So tell us a little
bit about you and your background.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Sure, thanks, b D. Glad to be here. So I've
been in the business of what we now call wealth
management for now fifty five years, so I'm getting an
edge of understanding it. I started back when it was
backly a brokerage company and turn it into financial planning
(01:30):
and then wealth management, and it's really been a lot
of fun. And I think in terms of the book
Optimizing Longevity, but the whole idea of longevity is if
you can figure out something that you like to do
and you keep doing it, that's a great way to
live a longer and healthier life because you're doing something
(01:52):
with purpose. So we just yesterday were noticed that for
the I think sixth or eighth year in a row
I can't remember which, we rated one of the best
places to work in the United States and financial services.
And actually our CEO's compensation depends on continuing to win
those kinds of awards. We we like that a lot,
(02:16):
and it's it's been a lot of fun. So I'm
looking forward to our conversation today. I don't know much
about UK rules in terms of finance. I know there's
some differences in some similarities. But so I step off
off a curb and running in front of an oncoming car,
I didn't look left or whatever it was.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
I love good no today, but really it's more talking
about less about the financial side and more about what
people should plan for in their life. When you talk
about it and optimizing longevity is it's it's not the
old thing is so used to be. We would we
would look at retirement as a as a gold watch
in a sixty five and you're out the door. You're
(03:00):
a little bit older than sixty five.
Speaker 3 (03:02):
And I don't even remember sixty five.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
That's classic. But it used to be that. So when
you first started off, what did you I mean, because
it's all fifty five years in this industry and everything
else and helping other people retire and do whatever they did.
What does it look different now for you than you
thought it would when you started in the industry or
in business.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
I think I think, like most people, yeah, it wasn't
so much a gold watch because I've pretty much developed
my own business and worked for myself, so you got
to you got a gold watch for a big company.
But realistically, you know, retirement was sort of invented in
this last century. Toward the middle of last century, we
didn't really have retirement. People worked and you know, and
(03:49):
then social Security in the US came in, and I
know a post war in UK dif different systems came in.
So we really thought of it as as a time
to sort of relax. And I think I think most people,
myself included, probably had sort of a golden haze. You know,
you thought, Okay, I'm gonna have sixty five and then
things will be great and I'll go on for a
(04:10):
little while. In my particular case, further along, I mean,
this isn't when I started, but my old mother. I
don't know if I ever told you this story. My
mother decided to go to work when she was sixty five.
She never had worked. My dad didn't want her to work. Wow,
she wanted to become a travel agent. And she became
(04:30):
a travel agent and worked from age sixty five to
age ninety six, on which she died two weeks after
she quit working and made sure that her everybody she
had opened had had their trips planned, and then she
went off. So her mother died at one hundred and one,
learning Spanish in case she needed it someday.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Wow, that's in case you did.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
I had a little different view of what longevity might
do in that regard. I do think the important thing,
and the shift has been that life isn't linear anymore.
You know, you'd go to school, you'd work for the
same employer, and you'd retire as you said, you a
gold watcher or whatever the equivalent was for you. And
that's clearly not the case anymore. And the origin of
(05:19):
the book was actually work done at the Stanford Center
on Longevity, the sort of relevant I think to a
lot of your a lot of your listeners, uh. And
the idea was, when you're thinking of longevity as the
way I think you should think of it, which is lifetime,
it's not just post retire but it's not just aging.
(05:41):
It's it's what happens with early childhood education, what happens
with early training and learning, what happens with multiple jobs.
When you think of it that way, we used I
used the analogy of a road. ATA was the actual
new map of life that came out of Stanford was
for policymakers. It was for people to think about what
(06:01):
we needed to change in terms of education and laws
and all that sol and I wanted to make it
a little bit how an individual would take these same
ideas and think about those different areas. So it was
to give context to longevity instead of just thinking, oh boy,
I'm going to live longer. And I think for most
of us, certainly for me, I'm much less concerned with
(06:25):
the length of life than with the quality of life
and the quality of health. And you know, they say
now that a lot of the researchers in medicine are
targeting being healthy up until two weeks before death, and
I said, I would prefer twenty minutes, but two weeks
I'll take it. You know, if you can have a
(06:47):
relatively healthy life and do a lot of the things
you want to do, whether it's post retirement or shifting
your retirement, that's really that's really the goal.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, definitely, But when you're when you're starting to plan that.
So if we go to the you have the business
owner point of view, So if you put both hats on.
For me, is the business owner point of view. And
now you've moved into this chairman role and you've put
a CEO in place, and you've put in systems and
things like that, what are some things from the business
(07:21):
owner point of view? And then the other side for
me is what are people need to be thinking about
as business owners talking to their professionals, their their their
financial advisors, things like that. So if we go first
from the business owners still wanting to have possibly their
their name on a spot, engaged in board meetings and
things like that, what are some transitions that people are
(07:43):
getting wrong by fully retiring. Possibly?
Speaker 3 (07:46):
Yeah, I think if your audience is mostly the people
who are the founders and primary owners of businesses, yes,
then then they have the opportunity to guide the business
in a way that works for them, which I started
doing a couple of decades ago actually, And to me,
(08:09):
that means you're thinking about do you really enjoy the
business or aspects of what aspects do you enjoy about
the business and what you don't like. So very early
on I decided things I didn't like and I gave
them to other people to do, but also retained enough
influence and control that I get to decide now what
(08:29):
I want to do. That takes a long time to
get them. So for the business owner, I'm going to
go to the second part of your question because it's related.
I think it's a very good idea to talk to
professionals about all sorts of things like what is it
that you really want to do? I know you provide coaching,
(08:50):
and that really isn't a critical part to think about
what do you want to do? What does your spouse
want to do? It is a pretty good idea to
get out of the way early because you know who's
in charge, yes, and so if you get those early on,
you can you can begin to guide the business structure
and your succession planning or if you're going to sell,
(09:11):
or whatever you're going to do to to leave you
the room to do what you want to do. If
you haven't thought about what it is you want to do,
that that is unlikely to work out in the best
possible way. So that's why I think looking at in
context and and and in the what I call the
(09:33):
off ramps, and you've thought about as pit stops along
the road, what you really want to do is when
whenever you're coming up to one of those, you really
want to look around and see who's actually done this before. Uh.
Sometimes these off ramps are unintended things like divorce or
bad health or family issues that but there are counselors
(09:56):
that they've been there before. You know, the first thing
you should be doing is looking for people who have
actually done this before. Maybe they're professionally attuned to things
and they can help you. Don't. Don't try to go
through it by yourself. And so whether it's financial or emotional,
or health or anything else. And I think it's very
(10:18):
clear that as longevity continues to increase, particularly for well
educated and or upper income people, it's actually it might
be interesting to know it's actually education more than income.
But as that continues continues to develop, you really have it.
(10:41):
At the traditional retirement age of call it sixty five
or early sixties, whatever it is, you probably have thirty years.
And frankly you might even have more. Now we don't
know all these new treatments and wonder stuff. Most of
that's kind of hot air. Still there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of it, and some of it's real.
So it's going to allow you to be healthy, I believe,
(11:05):
a longer. So what do you want to do with
that time?
Speaker 2 (11:09):
And so you've you've done. Those are great from a
professional point of view. When you were asking people and
you you and I both dealt a lot with Belcorra,
Jeff Belcoora, and so what what do you think some
better questions that people either can ask of themselves or
can ask their spouse.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
If somebody asked them. Yeah. Yeah, well, as you know,
with the Jeff's system, and we actually we actually have
in the Journal of Financial Planning, there's an article I
was in fifteen, I think that's right, which is in
how you ask these questions and it's based on us
(11:50):
and the interesting part of this to get to these
issues in what Jeff actually came up with and as
you as you will know, it came from cancer patients
at UCSF and the idea that if you if you
went into a doctor and you've got a diagnosis of
a dread disease, particularly cancer, that you really couldn't hear
(12:13):
what the physician was saying to you. You probably didn't
know the words anyway, but I mean you really couldn't
listen to it. So they started by having medical students
go to the meetings with you, et cetera, et cetera.
What we found out in asking questions is one it
is better to do it with somebody over the phone
(12:36):
than in person. And the reason for that is you're
not taking physical cues when you're even when you're on zoom,
I can see you and I can see whether you're
responding to what I'm saying, but whether you're responding is
not really what I'm thinking necessarily. And so if you
do this over the phone and you do the triage
(12:58):
that Jeff talks about, which is asking questions and going
deeper than saying is there anything more than doing this
again and again, you really get to a much deeper understanding.
And what we found is that people, and particularly doing
it together with spouses one a lot of times spouses
have never really talked about what they really want to
(13:20):
do other than in you know, it'd be nice to
have a second home or nice to go sailing or whatever,
but they haven't really gone through what all the implications better,
what are the financial implications, what are the family indications?
So you want to sail around the world, but you
have relatives who are not in good health and you
(13:43):
don't want to leave them. If you had that discussion, well,
if you go through this in detail, you'll get there. Yeah.
So it's not an easy process and it's kind of
funny that and it's iterative, as you well know, you
have to go back and forth and you have to
think about this for a long time and you get
to know people better. But that's why financial planning today
(14:06):
is not not really that simple. It's not a straight line,
and it's not just the people you're talking to, it's
their whole extended family.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
You've been million in this. But I think one of
the best things I read in this not best, but
one of the things that's really hit home recently of
lots of people losing other people is health as an
asset and walking through so kind of you get people
to retire and go back to the sixty five model,
and then they were expected to die by sixty seven
(14:38):
according to Social Security, you know, so we only gonna
have to pay for him for two years. So you
get so many people, I'm sure Albert Hargrove, and we've
had it where people retire and then they actually can't
physically do anything because they've drained themselves so much. So
if we're now working till sixty, what's something that people
should be, oh, business owners and other peop people should
(15:00):
be building into their overall longevity plan.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Well, I think I think you hit on it in
the sense that as early as you think about it,
if it's not native to you, I mean, there are
people that obviously get into business who were let's say
they were athletes or something, and they continue to be athletes.
But leaving that aside, the sooner you think about health
(15:27):
being one of your primary assets. And for most people
up until the point when maybe they would have retired otherwise,
their biggest asset is in fact human capital, right, and
human capital goes away if you can't work and you
haven't kept up your learning those two things. So as
(15:48):
soon as you think about it, it starts your own
health program. And one of the things that I think is,
I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of
quackery and the business, but typically your grandmother was right.
You know, eat well, sleep enough, get enough exercise, and
(16:09):
don't worry an exercise about whether you get ten thousand
steps or seventy five hundred steps or some number that
somebody made up. By the way, those were all made
up numbers. I don't know if you know that the
ten thousand steps came from a weird thing in Japan
that people quoted and they thought it was science. But
it's not. So get up an exercise with my wife
(16:33):
and I made it. We're not quite sure. It might
be a terrible mistake. We just got a puppy about
fourteen months ago. She's killing us, killing us, But I
mean we're up every morning at six o'clock. I'd take
the dog out, you know. And so if I were
thinking about being lazy and staying in bed, it just work.
(16:55):
I think that's a critical thing. And a lot of
people think, well, you know, fifty five, I'm not going
to be I'm not going to be an athlete again.
It's not relevant. Go take a walk, get off the couch.
Make little changes in your diet. You know. You don't
have to change everything, and you don't have to eat
all green vegetables and never have any meat again or
(17:18):
anything like that. Just you'll be reasonable and your health
can improve a lot. And with a lot of this,
particularly some of the you know, the current wonder drug
are these weight loss drugs which now in fact seem
to have all positive side almost all positive. Sometimes they
affect a digestion, but they're actually getting cleared by the
(17:41):
FDA for cardiac treatment, actually improve heart function.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Yeah, it's amazing, and it's it's all good stuff. So
you've got a chance with a lot of this coming
out that that will be helpful. But what you can
do yourself is reasonably try to improve on all these
areas where you know, think about your sleep habits, think
about how I hate to say, is how much you drink.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
That's a tough one. We know how much we we
know how much we drink. Is it supposed to be
the limiting the amount or is it yet?
Speaker 3 (18:15):
Well? Yeah, but you now be reasonable in fact, and
also for business owners, step back and think analytically about
what you read. I'll take the drinking as one of them.
It turns out, of course that red wine isn't necessarily
(18:38):
good for you, but it's a little bit bad for
you unless you, you know, drink an enormous amount. But
if you look at the statistics, you have to actually
read the statistics, which the newspapers usually don't get right,
because while it increases your risk of all cause mortality,
it increases it by four or five percent from a
(18:58):
very low level, a very low level. But the headline
always says it's bad for you.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
Well, not really, and it could it could double your
chance of heart disease. But that's going from four percent
to eight percent.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, still not even there's not even that much unless
you you know, of course, if you drink.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
A lot, if you do anything in excess, it can be.
Speaker 3 (19:23):
Anything on action, that's right. And so you know, look
at those things. I actually read through and pay attention.
And you don't have to. You don't have to do
it all the time, but when you see something like
that that bothers you. The US has a great example
of something that was damaged to a lot of people,
and that was the use of hormones and its effect
(19:47):
on breast cancer. Okay, and millions of women didn't take
hormone treatments because it increased your risk of breast cancer,
except that it did literally increase it. They said twenty
five percent. It did increase the risk from a four
percent to a five percent chance. And so millions of
people had decades of discomfort or something that if they'd
(20:09):
known what that number meant, would have gone what Even
physicians don't I mean didn't know. I mean now they do,
but yeah, no, So you have to look through that
stuff and say, Okay, if I were going to walk
ten thousand steps a day, what happens if I walk
five thousand steps a day, what happens technically is you
(20:32):
get about eighty five to ninety percent of the benefit
of walking ten thousand steps.
Speaker 2 (20:37):
So then, like do you talk about in chapter seven,
and this is something near and dear to both of
our hearts, is building the financial security from the start.
So if somebody, somebody's listening to this and they're forty
years of age, and the thing that you and I
typically hate to hear when they say I'm going to
retire and you say where's your retirement plan? They say,
you're standing in it. You know, the family business or
(20:59):
the store or restaurant or whatever it is. So how
do people start building their foundations from the beginning to
start that even just savings or things like that. So
what should they be thinking about as a business owner?
Speaker 3 (21:14):
Well, I think there's two basic things, or two different
areas that you'd be thinking about. One is that all
the traditional stuff that we think about investing generally is true.
You start as soon as you can, you diversify, you
save relatively continuously, and you really want to start that,
(21:38):
even if it's at a very low level. The moment
you start thinking about it, you know, start contributing and
be diversified and don't try to hit a home run.
A lot of business owners tend to think and you
know as well as either the fallacy called the illusion
of control. They think if they're running something, it's going
(21:59):
to be good. You know, the risk isn't as high
for me because I'm doing it well. Not true. The
risk is still there, and so you want to continue
and diversify alongside building your company. Now, having said that,
it's easy to say, and many years ago, I borrowed
a lot of money to start this business and realize
(22:21):
how difficult it is, but you can still begin saving
something and the compounding effect, as you well know, the
compounding effect if you start at twenty five or thirty
or thirty five is enormous. So if you're forty and
you haven't started, start, let's start and use whatever you
can do tax wise in terms of if there are
(22:45):
are retirement plans that you put into the company, et cetera,
if you can't just good outside. The other thing that's
part of that, in my mind is that because human
capital is such an important part of your lifetime net worth,
(23:06):
the fact for most of us it's what actually creates
all of the networth that you have, you really have
to start thinking about protecting the human capital that you have.
How do you protect human capital while you do it
in two fundamental ways. One you have insurance or three,
(23:27):
let me make it three. You have insurance to the
extent you can have disability and life insurance and things
like that, long term care insurance. And I believe you
should use those as much as you can afford to
use them. I mean you have to balancing out. You
should have bigger reserves. Traditionally, financial planners always say, you know,
(23:49):
don't hold any cash because cash is a drag. How
many times do you hear in cash drag and investment?
I view cash and I think I said in the
book cash is an option premium. When you pay an
option premium, you expected the premium sometimes will expire worthless,
(24:11):
but on balance, you expect to make something from the
options over time. Right, Well, when bad things happen and
you have some cash, it really helps. So keep a
little bit more cash than people say. And then the
other thing, in terms of your human capital, continue to
learn throughout life. You have to keep up in whatever
(24:32):
field you're in, with whatever's going on, and it's going
to be easier and easier. You can do all this
through the internet. Now you've got artificial intelligence to help
you learn things, it's going to be easier and easier.
And because it's easier, other people are going to be
doing it. So if you want to be competitive when
you're seventy years old, you should be thinking about staying
(24:55):
current by using whatever. That could be the LITW University,
it could be the Internet, it could be however you
want to do it. But you have to stay up
with things. And you know, in our in my business,
I have continuing education requirements. Yes, actually fifty, there's three
(25:16):
different ones I have to do. I think it's sixty
hours a year of additional training. So they make you
go do this. It's very useful. I think it's great.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And so if you're if you're looking at people that
have gone longevity besides besides mom and grandma, So who
else do you kind of look up to or envy
that that are in your peers or other other people
that you that you could name.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
Well, the classic is Warren Buffett. It's ninety four. Actually
I knew Charlie Munger. He died, you know, just just
at a at one hundred. I think. Well, in our
own firm was a small brokerage firm. We had people
(26:03):
that retired in the mid nineties when I was coming
up and I thought it was wonderful. You know, we're
still industry is still affected by ages, yes, clearly. And
you know the reality is that older workers are not
(26:27):
better or worse than younger workers. They're just different. They
may not have the same technical skills or the same
ability to pick up new things quickly, but what they
have is wisdom of having done bad things before. Hours
like to say, experience means something I don't have to
do again, right, and you know, it's very helpful. And
(26:52):
so what we have in our firm, for example, most
of our teams are pretty well aged diverse. We have
people in their early early seventies and people in their
late twenties working together on a client team, and they
do different things. But there if you have respect for
(27:13):
what the other person could do in the interaction, it's
it's really well. The demonstrations are that it actually works,
and so I think there's a lot of people there are.
Obviously in some industries. It's a lot easier if I
were if I were had a carry. I don't know
(27:35):
heavy stones. As a mason right now, I'm not sure.
Although I had a level that was a Mason until
he died of cancer. But he was a Mason until
he was seventy eight.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Wow, that's a that's a good.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
Tough old guy.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So and so, when you were making the let's do
two transitions one the first time, when you started to
build the systems and the people and handing stuff off,
what was the hardest thing that you handed off? First?
If you remember back to the day that you said,
I this is hard like client work or what was
the hardest thing to let go of because it wasn't
Russ that was going to be doing it?
Speaker 3 (28:18):
Yeah, Yeah, for me, it was it was not hard
to hire to hand off the client work because they
got really good focus from the younger people who are there.
And I still I would meet with people a couple
of couple of long term clients asked if I are
still alive, but questionable the hardest thing to hand off? Well,
(28:46):
when do you start a business. And you know this
as well as I do. When you start a business,
you're probably you're probably able to do everything in that
business better than everybody else. You're the one that you know,
I could fix the copy machine and do all that,
and we rather quickly. You're decades ago got to the
(29:08):
places where I couldn't do that and you and that
was uncomfortable for a while. I mean I had to
give myself a good talking to on a couple of occasions,
just you know, get out of the way. Let somebody
else try to solve the problem. Recognize that they're very
likely to make some mistakes. But I was very likely
(29:30):
to make some mistakes too, So it's not like, you know,
if I'm going to do it, it's perfect. And getting
to that transition where you cannot do everything that everybody
else could do, and now we have a lot of
with our it guys and all of the technical stuff.
You know, I can turn my computer on, but I'm
not the guy to program things.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
And then if we're looking at it from the career
path sort of view, if you were to look back
at Russ's career path through helbro Grove and all the
other stuff, what would you have done differently? Not on
the handing stuff off to people, but like time at
work versus holidays, versus time studying versus sabbaticals. So what
(30:15):
would you have done differently on your road maps?
Speaker 4 (30:18):
Are you're atlas, I would have one thing would have
changed me although I have done the vacations and things
all along, and volunteers.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
I actually back in the early nineties, starting in the
early nineties, so that's a long time ago now started
doing a lot of volunteer work. So I've actually done
a quarter or a third of my time has been
on volunteer things. I've had some big, big projects in
the aquarium Long Beach, which is one of the largest
(30:52):
United States. Actually physically was in charge of building it,
even though I didn't know anything about aquarium. I didn't
have up until I was probably in my late forties.
I didn't have enough confidence in my own ability that
people would follow me. So we did a lot of
(31:15):
business deals with other people where we put money with them,
and finally I decided to do that internally and build
the firm internally, and that that was very helpful. I
made the commitment when when I started doing that, though,
that I was not going to not take vacations and
(31:38):
so so it was pretty interesting. Let's just say that
I was functionally functionally bankrupt is technically the right term.
But by borrowing money to start the business and and
and at leasting some very nice office pace and things
(32:00):
like that, and we would still take vacation. I'd spend
time with it. I never missed any of that. Our
son's athletic events, my daughter's drama, and you know, went
to all of those. I think you have to decide
what's important, and so I wouldn't have done that any differently.
I might have taken even more time. I'm not sure,
(32:23):
but I had to. I had to get that. I
had to get to that level where I ended up
with enough self belief. I call it in the book
self efficacy, and I think that's a that's the right
term comes from Albert van Dura, who liked to say
he was the fourth most quoted psychologist in the world,
and the other three were dead. Yes, he's a great guy,
(32:48):
but if you don't have self belief, you can't do anything.
If you do have it, you still have risks and
luck and probability and all that stuff. But you got
you got to have that first. And I should have
had more, but should have would have doesn't do it
and tells something happens and you decide you've got it,
(33:09):
and then then you decide you can do things. And
so I've started a lot of things since then, and
some of them worked. And some haven't.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
So two things now, So before as we wrap up,
why now did it take you this long to write
the book? When you sat around all these amazing authors
that you've brought through, worked on their things, been their
best friends, with Coach, with Tim, with bel Kora, with
all these people, why now?
Speaker 3 (33:37):
Why not? Well, I didn't actually set out to write
a book. I did, in fact, at the Stanford con
Cea on Longevity, I was the guy that instigated the
meeting that created There was actually a very large meeting
by invitation about fifty people from around the world and
(33:57):
some academic and a lot of business people to think
about the first round of the New Map of Life.
We weren't calling it that. And then I also instigated
the meeting a year later to begin to organize it,
and then we ended up at the center of Loegevity
actually hired nine PhDs to actually look at the different
(34:19):
areas and they studied it. So that was the project.
And then as that began to sort of marinate and
I started to think about it, I realized that, well,
excuse me. And when the New Map of Life came
out as published, there's a lot of academic stuff and
then there was a summary. The summary is about sixty
(34:40):
or seventy pages worth looking at. I hired a fellow
to do a graphic analysis of each domain. He was
a retired Irish lawyer living in Melbourne, Australia that considered
himself a storyteller, but he did graphic art. Yes, so
he created the graphics that are in the book, and
(35:03):
Stanford uses them as well. I just gave them, gave
it to them to use. So I realized I had
all this fundamental stuff, but it was it was more
at the policy level rather than something that our own
clients could read or would read. I mean, they all
the stuff was out there, but they wouldn't they wouldn't
do all that. But he decided to start putting it together,
(35:24):
and I wrote the first the introduction, and that that
that kind of thing that, well, I guess I have
to do the whole book, so sort of forced myself.
I didn't actually want to write a book.
Speaker 2 (35:34):
So fortunately, and going back to that overall, I mean,
and we met now almost a decade ago, but so
surrounding yourself with people that are in your industry, that
are surrounding that and all around the industry or all
around thoughts that you like, So meet once a year
do all this type of stuff. What can people do
(35:57):
to bring peers together that might cost them some time,
might cost them some money, might cost them some human capital,
but can expand their universe, their longevity and that type
of stuff. So what can people think about and do that.
Speaker 3 (36:11):
I know in our in our industry, we generally call
them study groups. But I think I think what you
can do almost any industry is meet some like minded
people and think about issues that you that affect all
of you, and you can create, uh A some way
(36:31):
of coming together. And you have to be willing to
provide value. And I think what that means is you
have to be willing to put in money, time effort,
I have to be willing to share. And what we
found in several of these different groups that that meet
is that people tend to be fairly open. They tend
(36:54):
to tell the truth, uh and and it's extremely valuable
to actually get that kind of feedback. So sometimes you
have to be geographically separated and you don't want to
be too competitive. You don't want to have a guy
that's got a shop right next to years maybe, but
but I think almost anybody can think about how to
(37:16):
put that together and you'll find most people are interested
in participating in the sense as you well know, because
you deal with business owners and leaders. When you're the
primary owner of the primary leader, who you talk to.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
Nobody.
Speaker 3 (37:35):
You can't talk to many of the firm because they
work for you, and then you know they're compensation is
dependent on them, so you know, I mean, you can
talk to them, but let's they say you're not going
to get quite the straight scoop that you will talk
to another business leader. And so I'm sure you put
these people together sometimes, but I think that's that's extremely
valuable and when you get tired of being by yourself,
(37:58):
you can go talk to people. We actually had a
group that got it started in the early nineties. It
lasted for about ten years. There were four firms that
were similar to our firm, and we met and they
were spread around the country so we really didn't compete
and we would get together and you know, talk about anything.
(38:20):
And it was so valuable to do. And we could
call if you had an issue, call somebody to say, hey,
I've got this problem. What are you going to do? Well?
What did you do? And you get the right answer.
So I couldn't encourage people more to do that both
because the social interaction by itself is valuable. By the way,
(38:42):
it's very good for your longevity, yes, in that sense,
but it's really great for helping you do well in
your own business and having a good life. It's good
for your mental health. So keep your health.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Span going very good. So here's here's the moment, so
optimizing longevity, Russ Hill, the rewind moment. So drop one
thing here now that if somebody only listened to the
last minute, they would go crap. I want to rewind
and listen to the whole thing again. So what's what's
(39:16):
your what's your golden nugget? The golden nugget, I.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
Would say this, rather than working on your money, working
on your health and your social relationships, because those are
those are the foundation of the money you have. Sure
you pay attention to the other things, but if you
do that first, you know your family, your health, you
(39:42):
can make them you can make the business part of
the money part come out.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
That's awesome, Russ, thank you so much for joining me
on the Growth Selling Retired podcast. It's been amazing.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
Thanks, it's been fun.
Speaker 1 (39:56):
Thanks for joining us on Grow Sell and Retire For
more and tools, or to book one of our team
members to work with your team business, or to speak
at your event or conference. Visit rockfind dot co dot uk.
If you like the podcast, you'll love one of Bede's
three books, The Assistant Purchase True Gravity and the Book.
The podcast is based on, Grow, Sell and Retire. If
(40:20):
you want to work for the rest of your life,
that is your business. If you don't, that is ours.
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