Eric Flynn's LinkedIn profile lists the location of his current job, chief wealth officer of Atlanta-based Aprio Wealth Management, as "remote." He isn't kidding. Flynn, whose $4.1 billion-asset business sits inside a top-20 accounting firm, works from his sixth-generation family ranch, an hour outside Bozeman, Mont. Although he travels extensively, he says, "Bozeman's home."
Speaking with Barron's Advisor, Flynn, who joined Aprio last fall, discusses the unusual logistics of his situation. He argues that as independent RIAs increasingly look to bolt on services, a fully integrated offering like Aprio's is better suited for long-term success. And he explains how ranching helped prepare him for his wealth management role.
Where did you grow up, and how did you come to be in this industry? I'm in Bozeman, Mont., where I'm a fifth-generation Montana rancher. [Flynn's children are the sixth generation.] It's not a traditional background for wealth management, but I knew early on that wasn't going to be my path. With my older brother taking over the family farm, I got a master's in accounting. My first job was with Arthur Andersen -- I didn't realize I'd gotten on the Andersen Titanic after it had hit the iceberg, so that was a short stint. I then moved over to wealth management and never looked back.
Why did you move to wealth management? After Andersen, I thought, do I want to go re-interview at all the Big Five [accounting firms]? I ended up interviewing at a family office that was looking for an accountant to help with reporting. My father-in-law was in wealth management at the time and encouraged me to look outside the CPA world. That prompted me to jump into wealth management. So I joined the family office, which was a fantastic opportunity to serve about a dozen families scattered all over the world.
Would you say Aprio's accounting roots help to make its offering distinct? Aprio is a top-20 public accounting firm with a wealth management arm founded in 1999. So we have a depth and breadth of service offerings across the spectrum. In the wealth management industry, everybody's searching for additional services and offerings. We've got the wealth management, the tax services, and pretty much everything you get from a top-20 public accounting firm, all integrated under one roof, along with estate planning and everything else. But what we really like to do is provide integration, and that's what differentiates us.
If you're a wealth management firm and you bolt on a tax practice, that's a very different thought process and service offering than having fully integrated accounting depth and breadth and consulting expertise across the board. A lot of RIA firms are trying to expand into the tax and estate offering, but they're bolting that on as an ancillary service. Having it in our DNA, truly integrated, we can deep as we want with our experts.
Describe your target client. One that has that complexity that starts to require a lot of the different bits and pieces that we offer across the Aprio platform. Think of small to midsize business owners who've got complicated tax work, complicated entity structuring, as well as wealth management needs. We can put basically every expert they need in a room with them and do truly integrated planning. Those are the clients we excel with.
When do you tend to enter the life cycle of a client? We see clients at every stage, but we can help most when we get involved as early as possible. Even when they're just getting their business off the ground and getting the right entity structure, we can help them with long-term planning and cash flows, and ultimately what they want to do with the business, way down the road when they're thinking about liquidity and an exit plan. But we get a lot of clients that are successful and are probably between three and 10 years from an exit, and we can help guide through that whole process.
You joined the firm in November as chief wealth officer. What does the job involve? I help run the advisory team, and I sit on the executive leadership board for the wealth management arm, so I spent a lot of time working on our service offering, our investment offering, and helping to coordinate all the pieces.
Why was your role created? The wealth management arm had grown significantly over the past 12 to 18 months, and the team was thinking strategically about how to grow the wealth management presence within the Aprio umbrella. We'd expanded the leadership team to guide the strategy, knowing that we're growing quickly. We wanted to make sure we're doing all the right things from a client-service perspective as we grow and scale for the future.
We're in an interesting era. Increasingly, if a business can hire a valuable person, they will let them work far from headquarters as long as they're willing to travel a bit. Do you feel like you're part of such a trend? The good that came out of Covid is that everybody discovered they could work remote and still be high functioning and get everything done that they needed to do. I think there are a lot of people like me out there, even across our executive leadership team: We're scattered across the country and not necessarily around major metro hubs. You have to be willing to travel. I think the value of being in person is intangible; I value that, which is why I travel. I want to be in the office. I want to build those personal networks and relationships in person. It's really hard to do that over Zoom or Teams.
Remote hiring has really expanded opportunity for both employer and employee I think. Yeah, I agree with that, it's a win-win, 100%.
How often are you in Bozeman versus Atlanta? Bozeman's home for me. I spend most of my time here, but obviously with managing the team, I travel almost every week. So I spend quite a bit of time in Atlanta, and then I bounce across the country to all the other places where we have advisors. It keeps me on the road frequently. But Bozeman's home.
Is coming from a ranching family an asset for the work you do now? Coming from a ranching family teaches you a lot of things: work ethic, being true to your word, your handshake is your bond, being true and authentic no matter what you do. That's very applicable to the wealth management industry, where you're building relationships with clients, prospects, advisors and others. So I think it's a huge asset, and I wouldn't trade my background for the world.
Can you describe where you are in the scaling? At the moment we're at 15 advisors, and we don't have a specific target number, but we are active in the M&A space as well as recruiting. We're continuing to add advisors across the country and to search for other firms that would be a good fit. We've done a lot over the past eight months on platform expansion and improvement. That means working through our tech stack, making sure we're offering the best-of-breed technology. As we know, technology across the industry is changing very quickly. So we're trying to make sure we're leveraging technology appropriately, whether it's reporting, CRM, AI, all the different pieces, and making sure it all works together so our teams can be more efficient and we can serve our clients better.
How are your client service teams organized? All our clients have an advisor, a financial planner and a client-service associate as well as a CPA. We make sure all four of those folks are coordinated to bridge the gap between tax, consulting, and wealth management. And if we need estate planning attorneys, we can pull them in as well.
What's your approach on the M&A front? We're looking for strategic opportunities to grow the firm in a smart way. We want people who are the right fit, who understand the accounting-affiliated model and want to be part of it. We're not like some of the private-equity aggregators out there trying to do every deal. We're very strategic with the types of folks we want to buy.
Do you do the M&A footwork in-house or use outside consultants? We have a team here at Aprio that focuses on that, so we do a mix of both.
What are the keys to fostering growth on the organic side? Organic growth is something the industry struggles with across the board. Being part of a big accounting firm, obviously we have the centers of influence built in, so it's about making sure we're serving our clients across the Aprio footprint to the best of our abilities, and that is our pipeline. We're focused on building relationships across all our CPA partners across the firm and trying to find opportunities to help serve our clients in a more cohesive, integrated way.
Does that include going through your accounting clients and saying, "Hey we also have this other service available"? That's some of it, but it's really up to our advisors and CPAs to make sure we're identifying clients that have a need and then trying to figure out how we best service that client and fill that need. A lot of times it's the CPA talking to the wealth manager and saying, "Hey, I've got a client who's going through this particular situation," and then bringing the wealth management team over to help solve the problem. Sometimes that leads to being a wealth management client. And sometimes it's just we're adding expertise and advice to the CPA side of the house. So a lot of it's just a very collaborative culture of doing the right thing for the client.
What's an innovation you've seen in the industry, either at Aprio or elsewhere, that you're excited about? The biggest change in the industry right now is the impact of AI in how we can serve our clients, and I think that's changing by the minute. Every conference you go to you see a new AI provider, a new AI tech tool to help either improve efficiency or reporting or serve your clients. Technology is going to change how we serve our clients and do what we do over the next year or two; I think it's changing that quickly. One of the biggest innovations is just using AI more in our day-to-day life to make us more efficient, get answers to our clients faster, and collaborate better as a team. Whether it's data gathering, meeting prep, things like that, we leverage AI for a lot of those things to help us be more efficient and solve problems as fast as we possibly can.
Lots of firms with $5 billion to $50 billion, say, of assets under management are bundling a spectrum of financial services together and going after business owners and other upmarket clients. A lot of them look the same. What do you think will determine what separates the winners from the also-rans? You're seeing the war for who can put the most service offerings together, especially when it comes to family office services. But I think the differentiator is the firms that are bolting it on versus the firms that are providing a cohesive, integrated client solution. We go to market as an integrated team, serving clients holistically versus having a bunch of bolt-on services. I think that's going to be the differentiator over time.
When you aren't at work, how do you like to relax and recharge? Well, having grown up on the ranch, it's most anything where I get to be outdoors. I spend a lot of time out on the ranch when I'm not traveling. I like to be outdoors whether it's doing that, or fishing, hunting, hiking, skiing, all that stuff. If I'm at home, I want to be outside. That's where I recharge.
Thanks, Eric.
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