This transcript was automatically generated.

Kathryn Toope: Welcome to Barenaked Money, the podcast where we strip down the complex world of finance to its bare essentials with your hosts, Josh Sheluk and Colin White, portfolio managers with Verecan Capital Management Inc.

Colin White: Welcome to the next edition of Barenaked Money. I’m here with my good buddy, Chris Brien here in the Kootenays in Central British Columbia, having a a big guest appearance on the Bare Naked Money. And Chris is the oh, I’ll leave you to introduce yourself. You’re an accountant, but I’m not sure what full title you wanna use for yourself, Chris.

Chris Brien: Sure. Well, I’m I’m, you know, I’m generally not huge on titles. But, yeah, my name is Chris Brian. I’m one of the partners at Pinnacle Accountants and Advisors. We started in the Kootenays.

We still have our main presence here in Kasselgar and Nelson in the West Kootenays. You and I have known each other for quite some time now, Colin. We’ve been close over the last few years. We’re operating firms that, you know, have some synergies together, so that kinda kicked it off. And here we are, and, you know, our firm has a few partners and a lot of clients throughout BC, and an excellent team of supporting characters.

Colin White: Let’s get into what makes you different because, you know, one of the things when we sat down and had our first beer was, you know, me basically bitching about the the accounting industry and how transactional it is and what a pain in the ass it is. And you guys have taken a different approach and a little bit of similarly from us, you’ve stolen south of the border from arguably what’s a better business model. You know, do you wanna allude to how you’re changing the accounting profession in Canada?

Chris Brien: Sure. Which is a lofty sort of goal, I suppose, to try to change an industry. But it you’re right. It did for us. You know, our observations of what’s been happening in The United States for quite some time in the industry have sort of inspired us, I guess you could say.

We’ve been following some of the leaders of of some of the change down there for for many years. Thinking about Ron Baker at class, Paul Dunn, guys like Tim Williams. There’s a lot of guys down there that have been pushing a movement to to change the industry. And and when we talk about what the industry or why it might need to be be changed, we could think about what’s happening now and what’s been happening for the last few decades because it it it really hasn’t moved much Mhmm. Since I was first hired into the industry, you know, twenty years ago.

And and well before that, my dad was a CPA and and, you know, it hasn’t changed since his day really in a lot of ways. CPAs are still in Canada, I think, generally underpaid. It’s been that way for a long time.

Colin White: The

Chris Brien: focus is on the billable hour, and that was invented many, many years ago. Mhmm. You know? The grind exists for not just beyond CPAs, but anybody coming into the industry that thinks they might wanna be a CPA. And that has partially that.

There’s a a number of factors, but we’re not getting a lot of new people entering our industry. We’ve got a lack of young, bright minds that that we can hire, and it’s leading to a bit of a talent crisis in the industry, certainly in Canada. And that’s the model I came up under and that my business partners came up under. And and we didn’t like it, and we didn’t think it worked very well for certainly not for the clients or for the employees, the team. It might have worked well for the for some of the firms and for some of the partners once you eventually become a partner.

Colin White: Well, let’s just stop for

Colin White: a second and and and and dig into that, you know, from the client’s perspective. Let’s put some more words around that. I think I know where you’re going to go, but maybe just stop and explain why having an accountant that charges you by the hour is not the optimal way to engage an accountant and the the limitations and problems that come with that.

Chris Brien: Well, any professional, I think, you know, yourselves included. And, you know, I often I read this example once a long time ago, but I think about the architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, and some of the things he designed. I think one of his most famous buildings was called Falling Water. And now I don’t know how true this is, but I read that it took him about fifteen minutes to design the place. And it’s remained one of the one of the most revered architectural, you know, housing developments and that people refer to.

Right? And so should he have been paid a hundred dollars for that because it took him fifteen minutes of his time, or should he be paid for the result? And we like to think that aiming at a result aligns us better with our clients. If we’re aiming at billable hours, then that incentivizes me and my team to rack up billable hours. Well, that’s not in the client’s best interest.

What’s in the client’s best interest is achieving a result. And if we can help them understand what that result is that they want to achieve and then and then hit it, you know, we should be fair paid fairly for for achieving that result. What that means is we need a way to measure our value and communicate our value and agree on our value with our clients is not the billable hour, which is tough.

Colin White: Yeah. I know. That’s true. Because I mean, the only the out the one of the problems with that from my perspective is many people don’t wanna call their accountant or lawyer or whoever because soon as that that person picks up the call, it costs them, $50, 5 hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, whatever it is. So then it becomes a reluctance to engage with the professional.

And then you start to lose the advantage of having that professional in your corner. So on both sides, I think incentivizes a bad behavior. The client’s trying to save money by not calling or contacting their professional. And on the professional side, you’re getting paid to spend time on something. You’re not getting paid to deliver a result.

So I think it incentivizes bad behavior on both sides.

Chris Brien: Yeah. And not to mention from an employee’s perspective, they’re being measured solely on their ability to produce billable hours. Right. And that creates all kinds of problems with with the team, with team members, and with you know, it’s it’s a bit of a broken model. Any accountant who came up under that model will tell you about the the race for billable hours and and how you slough them over into this file that, you know, your one partner is under hours on, and the the client ends up being billed what what the firm can justify billing them anyways.

Right? And so hours get sloughed around, and it’s not you know, what’s the point?

Colin White: It’s in there because it’s where the incentives lie. I think you hit it right on the head. And, you know, people listen to this podcast, I think know our model pretty well, but, you know, the incentives in the financial industry are about sales. Like, it’s a sales profession there for everybody gets motivated and, and, you know, the the all the compensation is based on sales. Therefore, that drives behavior.

And that’s not right either. So I think that one of the alignments we have is that you’ve removed those negative motivations for people or, you know, you’ve taken it out of the client conversation so that the professional who’s fully credentialed and doing good work is, is not motivated to do something that’s completely irrelevant or against the best interest of the client. Could you describe your service more as a subscription service? Is that is that an accurate way to to talk about it, or is there a more accurate way to talk about it?

Chris Brien: Yeah. That is an accurate way to describe at least a part of the function that that we perform and at least a part of at least a one aspect of our business. And so, you know, we have there there’s a lot of clients that use our our services, and and part of what they need from us is the delivery of somewhat of a commodity in terms of a financial statement and a corporate tax return and all the kind of stuff that comes along with that. There’s a deliverable. And surrounding that, they need an adviser available, and and we fill the role throughout the year that they can ask questions of, that they can get guidance from, that they can bounce ideas off of.

And so when we build out a and we do call it a subscription pricing agreement for for our corporate clients, we build the commodities in, and we build in enough of a price and not just for one single client, but for our portfolio so that our professionals can be available to really build those relationships, which is the piece that when we’re talking to prospective clients that they’re missing across the board with some of the bigger firms. Right? And so if we can get paid on a subscription basis, if we can push the commodity work into a system within our firm that that we can perform it efficiently and so free up our professionals, our smart people to build relationships with their clients and not measure them on the billable hour, then they’re incentivized and our clients are incentivized to build great relationships. And that leads to excellent client service. It leads to identifying our clients’ problems before they arise or potential problems that leads to identifying additional services that are really gonna benefit those clients because we’re talking all the time.

And so we we find it’s a model that’s started catching on, and it works really well for us.

Colin White: I don’t think I have run it explicitly across, you know, what you’re talking about anywhere else in Canada. I mean, are you starting to see an ecosystem build out around this model, or or is it the the entrenched mafia that’s running the accounting profession still tightly in control?

Chris Brien: Well, it’s not happening with the big firms. Right? We all know that. I I’m seeing it happen more and more amongst the small young firms that are popping up. Right?

That wanna build relationships with their clients that, you know, maybe the founders of the of the small firms came through the the bigger practices, and they’ve seen now that there is another way. They’ve seen some of the trailblazers start to have success, and and I’m not saying we’re a trailblazer. We’ve we’ve certainly followed in footsteps of others, but with every other every new firm that starts implementing a model like this, it it builds confidence with some of the younger small firms to give it a try. And even if they’re just trying, you know, value pricing. Right?

And they’re still tracking their time and and measuring that against the pricing to see if it fits. You know, we decided to just throw away our time sheets. So that’s how we converted. We said we’re not gonna use these anymore, and we’ll figure it out. But other firms are are even if they’re starting slow, they’re they’re coming on board with some of the stuff that that we’re doing and and that some of the firms in The US are starting to do or have been doing.

Colin White: On your mind, how does that change the reward system of being an accountant for somebody coming into the profession? Like, you know, it is I don’t have a word seem to be a lot more rewarding to be chasing outcomes for clients than it would be to chase the time sheet.

Chris Brien: I think it’s a lot more rewarding. And certainly, some of the young professionals that we’ve attracted that work for us think it’s rewarding and have told us it’s rewarding and have and have championed it, you know, to some of their colleagues that they’ve known in building their careers and to clients. You know, if you think about a lot of professionals and and I’m sure a lot of the people listening here are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Right? Something you learn in in college.

Basically, there’s a foundation of a pyramid that says you need physiological safety. Right? You need to be sheltered from the elements and have food. At the very peak of that pyramid is self actualization. Right?

And and that means doing something you believe in that that you like doing, and it’s not even necessarily about the pay as much as it is about doing something that you enjoy, that you believe in. Although, of course, we want our professionals to be paid well and to have good lives. And I think in our model, there’s there’s, you know, there’s room for professionals to actually be paid more than what the industry has been doing. And that becomes a loop where paid a little more, they give better service to their clients, they self actualize. We’re training our our CPAs, our young CPAs, on not just how to be accountants, but how to be business people, which I think is some of the training that doesn’t exist.

Certainly not when CPAs are younger in the big firms. They’re just put a grindstone.

Colin White: They’re kinda widgets in the machine at that age cause, you know, they’re being paid so little and they can build them out of so much. So like they’re the highest margin part of the the accounting profession. So they’re really valued. And that’s where a lot of the margin comes from the larger firms is like how many hours can I make my lowest you know, trained accountant, you know, bill because I get to put most of that in my pocket? Right?

Chris Brien: Right. But they’re not learning from that age of, you know, 25 to 40. They’re not learning how to build relationships with their clients. They’re not learning what it means to be a business person themselves, which really allows you to build relationships with clients. They’re not learning how to be pricing professionals.

They’re not learning how to be salespeople. They’re not learning all of these aspects of being a business person. They’re just learning how to grind out work under the system with the carrot dangling in front of them that one day, they’ll be a partner down the road, and they can do the same thing to the next guy.

Colin White: Yeah. Well, this is funny because when I went through the program, I did the CMA program leading to CPA. And the choice back in the day was, and I think still to an extent today is that some accountants go get the accounting training, then they transfer to industry to do something meaningful. Like they, you know, they did in order to feel like they’re accomplishing something rather than just building for the time. Because again, there’s always been that shortfall of I’m sick and tired of selling my time.

And, you know, there’s always so much time in the day and I’m not adding value. I’m more concerned about adding hours and that’s not as rewarding. So, I mean, it seems like you’re kind of breaking the mold. You can actually be an accountant and accomplish things and aim at goals that are meaningful to businesses. Because again, that’s one of the frustrations that we go through with our clients who we say, hey, did you run this past year account?

And he goes, no, I don’t talk to my accountant. He does my tax return. And I just, where do you go from there? It’s like, you know, your accountant should be doing more than that. This account is not willing to do that.

You need to find somebody who is because you have a legit question. And I will remind you one time you regretted your business model. When’s that? When the pandemic hit and everybody had to go through all of the machinations of trying to figure out the various government programs and aid programs. I think you got a little underwater there for a little bit.

Chris Brien: Yeah. Well, you know, our system allows for that. And the way that we allow for that is into our subscription model. We we build in quite a range of services. So if you were to put a proposal from us side by side with a proposal from one of the big firms, the price might be similar, but we try to leave room in our scope so that we can be available to our clients and help them when little problems crop up.

But we also train our people, our CPAs that are managing client relationships, and we train our clients to know when there’s scope creep, to know when there’s a change order. If you’re if you’re familiar with the construction industry,

Colin White: then you

Chris Brien: need to know when there’s a change order on the table. And and Yeah. We’re very good at communicating that to our clients. Yeah. So if they need something that’s out of the scope of what our subscription agreement covers, we need to have a conversation with them about the scope of whatever that new thing might be, whether it’s a project.

You know, one one that we do a lot of is tax reorganizations. We do valuation work. When something large and out of scope like that comes along, we have a pricing conversation with our clients. We price it upfront. We agree on the result, then we move forward.

And it’s not a big deal.

Colin White: As I normally do is that was a little bit tongue in cheek. I mean, the fact that your clients had an accountant that they thought they could turn to for advice at a time like that

Chris Brien: is

Colin White: the upside. Right? Because many people at that time wouldn’t think to reach out to their account and ask, you know, because it you know, as soon as the phone gets picked up, it’s gonna cost them $500. And they’ve never talked to their account in that way. They never engaged at that level, so they don’t have that advisor advisory relationship in their back pocket.

Chris Brien: I think if you’re running a small firm, medium sized firm, you better start building out a model that allow you to have those relationships with your clients because the big firms can afford to bleed to lose all their smaller medium sized clients because they get all their money from consulting and audit. The small and medium firms, you know, you can’t. You gotta build out a model that allows you to serve those clients. And in order to do that, you gotta get your pricing right. You gotta attract young professionals, and you gotta be a business person.

You’re not just an accountant. You own a business too.

Colin White: Well, let’s

Colin White: talk about that for a second about attracting young professionals. How much time does it take you to start a conversation with somebody who’s been raised in the existing abusive system and make an impression upon them that there’s an alternative and that alternative is real and you’re not just blowing smoke? Like, how how long of a process is that for you to to work through?

Chris Brien: I mean, in general, we follow the principle of of hiring slow and and firing fast. We wanna bring the right people onto our team, put the right people on the bus, and and take it somewhere great. Attracting talent in the accounting industry is difficult these days. If somebody’s been in that old system for a long time and entrenched in it, it can be tough to teach an old dog new tricks. Right?

But the pros of bringing somebody from one of the big firms are that if it’s the right person, they’ve experienced the shittiness, for lack of a better word, firsthand and are elated to come into a a system like ours, into a firm like ours where they’re given freedom, flexibility. They’re trusted. They’re given a set of tools. They’re not judged on billable hours. We expect them to work in and on the business and to develop a lot of skills besides just accounting.

So for the right person, as soon as we get them into our door, it’s it’s a bit of a revelation for them, and it becomes an easy an easy pitch to get them on board.

Colin White: Well, it’s funny because, you know, we’re we run exactly the same, you know, gambit. We’re trying to find people who are in the industry. The way I describe it is I want you to have a little bit of experience in the industry, but I want your soul to still be alive. Because if you stay in a bad system long enough, then your soul dies and you’re just kind of putting in time until you retire. And at that point, there’s not much I can do to turn somebody around.

But if they’re still sitting there frustrated with not being able to do the right thing for their client, but I describe this having a bit of their soul still alive. Absolutely. We can resuscitate your soul and give you something that’s way more rewarding to do. And this might be a shared issue as well. The issue in the financial industry is that it’s a very, I don’t know, I want to use the word greedy.

There’s a lot of people in there that are all about the Benjamins. Like they’re trying to, how much money can I make at this? And it attracts those people and there’s a fairly low bar to entry. Those people will never be a fit for us. So I’m not sure what percentage you know, of the pool we’re digging in.

Maybe it’s 10% of the financial professionals out there would be able to, you know, be in it, be able to get into it without losing their soul and then being able to actually, you know, pivot to a different way of delivery. Do you have any sense, do you frame it similarly in your head as to potentially what percentage of accountants would, who haven’t truly bought into the old system and see themselves as a managing partner by the age of 45 when they can abuse so much other people?

Chris Brien: Yeah. I I mean, I I I’d like to think it’s maybe maybe a little higher than 10%. Maybe that’s just me being overly optimistic. The lure of the some of the bigger firms that keeps the younger the younger folks sort of involved in chasing that is that there’s a, you know, there there’s a perceived sort of prestige about them, which Yeah. You know, you can’t avoid that.

There there just is. It’s it it you know? Whether or not it’s real and you’re gonna get anything out of it is a is a different story, but there’s a perception. And part of that is because they have a lot of resource. Right?

They’ve got all this money. They’ve got all these tools. They’ve got these big, fancy, you know, consultants and everything. But what they lack is a mentorship program. And so as much as you think you’re gonna get all this stuff out of working for one of them, at the end of the day, after three years, you’re gonna say, wow.

All I really did was work my ass off. I really never got to talk to the guy I thought was gonna be a big resource for me because his door was shut the entire time because he’s working three thousand hours. And I might be digressing here a little bit, but the point is I think there’s a big talent pool to draw from. We just gotta get the exposure out to the people and and and the young CPAs and the young people in your industry and show them there’s a better way to do to do things. And I think, you know, it’s gotta be the right person who really wants that self actualization and what percentage of people in general are that way.

Hopefully, more than 10%, but probably not more than 30 or 40%.

Colin White: Well, I think the newer generation coming along is expecting that and good on them. I think they all they’re they are trying to, you know, cast that off, but but I will share and I’ll I’ll steal from a previous podcast because we did podcast, you know, I don’t know when it was published last year sometime on the worst financial advice ever given. And one of the examples of bad financial advice actually came from a senior partner speaking to a new class of CPAs. So the senior guy walked out of the room with his speech to the people who were just newly minted CPAs, just just had passed their exam. And they were so the big priority that they threw for them in his speech was how they needed to go out and live like a partner.

They needed to go buy the biggest car they could afford and get the most expensive apartment they could afford and buy the nicest suit they could afford because they had to look like a partner if they were going to be a partner. So his encouragement was you have to get broke. And his benefit is get them all hungry and broke and they need their paycheck. Now they have to be successful and stay with the program. But that was the actual advice being given by a senior partner to a new graduating class.

And that’s probably not everywhere because I can’t imagine that that’s everywhere, But it’s somewhere. If you buy into that system, that’s exactly how you and you’re shaking your head because you know it to be true. Right?

Chris Brien: I do. Yeah. And it’s one way to keep an employee, I suppose. But Yeah. It’s no way to fulfill a a a human being’s, you know, real needs,

Colin White: I think. And the challenge is you get a young impressionable person in the room. I think this is how the world works. It’s like, well, I don’t have any perspective to bring here, so I guess this is the system. And, you know, at what point do they wake up and and recognize or gain that perspective or bump into somebody who explains to them it can be different?

Chris Brien: Exactly. You know? And it creates burnout, which is notorious in our industry, and it creates the darts of people wanting to enter our industry. You know? CPA is talking about getting rid of the of the common final.

It used to be the the uniform final in in my day. And in part just to attract more people to our industry because it’s a fucking grind. Pardon my language, but it’s a grind, and the rewards are not good for a long time. And we wanna change that.

Colin White: That. Yeah. Well, listen, obviously, we have some alignment and I think what our two firms really share in common is so we remove what both of our industries have is really negative, incentive packages. I think that the accounting profession and the financial world both suffer from a motivational issue that’s rooted in compensation. And it’s very difficult to try to aim for something higher.

If you’re rewarding somebody in one way, but paying them on another way, they’re going to go where the pay is. I mean, that’s just human nature. Right. And you can’t blame people for that. So I think the first step in having a company that is going in a different direction is you have to realign where the compensation is.

And if you don’t do that, you’ve got a great mission statement and everything, but you’re not likely going to make progress. So the secret is we shot this podcast both to have this conversation and educate people a little bit on what makes it, what can make a firm different. But you guys are actively on the hunt right now trying to find some talent. Do you want to take some time here to discuss that in particular, where you’re looking to hire and what you’re looking for in somebody?

Chris Brien: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. We’re we’re looking for new CPAs to join us, new to us. We’re looking for people who have, like you said, you know, ideally, a little bit of experience in the industry, our recent CPAs, or have a few years under their belt.

We do a bunch of review engagement assurance work. We don’t do audits, and we’ve got a great team. We put our culture first. So like you guys, first is fit. You know, we want the right people who are a fit with our team, and we can find something for them to do.

That’s kind of our philosophy. Part of what we need is to serve clients. We’ve got people knocking on our door every day, really good clients. We’re careful about who we select as our clients. If you look on our website, one of our blogs talks about our resonance criteria for accepting new clients.

It’s probably, you know, 10% or 15% of prospective clients that we accept as new clients based on that resonance criteria. And so we’re looking for young CPAs that wanna build a great client list with our support and learn how to be business owners, learn how to be great accountants and tax advisers, receive great mentorship from our senior team, and being nurtured into a a place where they become really valued advisers to our clients. And we’ve got all the tools and all the resources to get them there. Just need the right people that wanna do that.

Colin White: Well, selfishly, I’d like you to be able to take on some more clients myself. So Right. But I also think it’s a this is a good time to point out that, you know, you’re primarily talking about and focused on operating businesses. You know, that’s like, you’re you’re not an individual t one tax return shop. You guys, you know, engage at the at the the business level.

That’d be a fair description.

Chris Brien: And that’s part of the sales pitch in bringing on new team members and in bringing on new clients. We don’t we don’t do personal tax work, and we don’t do audits. And so we do basically bring on operating corporations. We get rid of the noise of the t one, the personal tax returns, and we also try to get rid of the noise of building the file, which is which is what you do in one of the big firms until you’re a manager as you build files. And then as a manager, you review files and give notes down to the junior who built the file.

Well, we try to push that aside a little bit. We have almost a a separate business that does the file work, and our professionals focus on client relationships.

Colin White: Listen. And I’m proud of you because you didn’t want to say that you needed to hire a crack curler, you know, to earn back the trophy that’s probably sitting on the reception desk here in Nelson. So you’ve you’ve dealt with that tragic loss very well and, like, you’re not letting it haunt you and, like, you have Yeah. Back the trophy.

Chris Brien: It does. Right? Just yeah. I just don’t let it show, and, it’ll be a different sport that we engage in next time. So

Colin White: I see.

Chris Brien: When we find our our ringer, we’ll let you know what sport we’re gonna play.

Colin White: Wow. Rigging the game. Attaboy. That that’s what I want from my account. I want him to rig the game.

Exactly. Whatever it takes for the w.

Chris Brien: That’s right.

Colin White: So is there anything we haven’t touched on that you were expecting we’re gonna chat about when we set this up?

Chris Brien: I don’t think so. You know, we talked about a little bit about what some of the problems in the industry are, what happens at the big firms, what we’re trying to do different differently to change the industry and to build a bit of a better firm. And we talked about the fact that we’re trying to attract some some young professionals, you know, and what our selling points are there. We don’t have any time sheets. So, I mean, as soon as you say that, there’s a lot of disbelief out there.

Like, wow. What does that look like? And and I encourage, young CPAs that are listening to this to call us and find out how we do that. We’re very focused on open work environments and mentorship and in giving our team a a seat at the table right away and building confidence in them and having them build a client list. You know, we just minted a partner who’s under 30 years old at our firm, and I don’t think that’s very common

Colin White: Mhmm.

Chris Brien: In our industry. But we like to think that if you give people the responsibility and the tools and the support early, then that self actualization comes early, and it contributes to being a great firm.

Colin White: Well, I guess similar to our entire group. So we’re up to 10 in our ownership group now, and most of them are under age 40. I think we had one come in under age 30. So the future of the firm is solid. And I think that that means something to clients.

I mean, it’s, you’re not dealing with a sole practitioner or an individual investment advisor who’s got a mortality issue. I mean, the what’s being delivered to the client is something that is, can be reasonably looked upon as sustainable for sure. And just to throw a plug in at the end, when I have a client who’s really well served from the accounting side, that’s really a pleasure to work with. And we’ve gotten to work on a lot of joint cases, which has been really nice so that we can coordinate and ask her questions and make sure that the financial advice we’re giving lines up with whatever planning is being done from the accountants. And we can quickly tell when we talk to an accountant or talk to a client who’s not being well served because there’s a lot of gaps.

And in those gaps, there can be some very meaningful things that could be done for them. So it’s very, very important that, you know, especially small business clients have that group of professionals around them that they treat as advisors. Like they don’t treat them transactionally, whether it’s your financial advisor, insurance advisor, lawyer, account, putting together that team, having the right team.

Chris Brien: Yeah. And you guys at Barrican are big on that, and you know we’re better than that. You know, we’ve built relationships with clients and not just with the client, but with their advisors, and you do the same. Right? We wanna we wanna know who their lawyer is.

We wanna know who their investment advisor is. You wanna have the relationship with all the key people around them so that when the client needs something, their team converges and solves it. Right? Alright.

Colin White: Well, I I think that pretty much wraps it up, Chris. So thank you for attending or being a guest on, Bare Naked Money.

Chris Brien: Thanks for having me. It’s a great

Colin White: talk. I’m sure we can We may even throw it out to our listeners that if there’s a topic they like to see us talk about, maybe we could do something that is more planning related, whether that’s regard to business transition or any of the other things that run across our desks all day every day. Maybe there’s a a compelling podcast out there that we could put together to maybe inform, inform the world and make the world a better place. So comment, let us know if there’s something you’d like to hear us talk about in more detail. And I’ll submit it to Kathryn, the keeper of our podcast, and she can either schedule it or not schedule it for us, depending on what else we have on the go.

So thanks as always for your attention, everybody, and look forward to having you hear us on the next episode of Barenaked Money.

Colin White: You’re breaking a sweat trying to figure out what your financial advisor is talking about, you’re not getting the service you need. You probably hate trying to get an answer from them, but you also think moving your accounts will be a headache. And it might be. But working with don’t rock the boat wealthplanning.com or .RU isn’t exactly stress free, is it? Call us.

We will demystify the world for you.

Kathryn Toope: For more information on the subject of today’s podcast or any other financial topic, please visit us online at verecan.com. That’s verecan.com. There’s plenty of information there, or you can reach out to someone on the team. Thanks for listening. Please note, the information provided in this podcast is for general information purposes only.

It is not intended as financial investment, legal tax, accounting, or other professional advice. Our discussions are not a solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to make any specific investments. Any decisions based on information contained in this podcast are the sole responsibility of the listener. We strongly advise consulting with a professional financial adviser before making any financial decisions. Listeners should be aware that investing involves risks and that past performance is not indicative of future results.

Barenaked Money is produced by Verecan Capital Management Inc, a licensed portfolio management company in Canada. We operate under the regulatory framework established by the provincial securities commissions in the provinces within which we operate. The views expressed in the podcast are our own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any regulatory authority. Remember, at Verecan Capital Management Inc, we focus on aligning our goals with yours, prioritizing integrity and transparency. For more information about us and our services, please visit our website.

Thank you for listening, and let’s continue to challenge the norms of the financial services industry together.