Do you ever wonder how some of the most successful people in the world achieved their success? The secret to success is revealed in this episode! Jimmy interviews Eric Schwartz, Founder/Executive Chairman, of Cambridge Investment Research, an internally controlled financial solutions firm.
Episode Keys:
- Why good leaders think about others to achieve their ultimate success.
- How you achieve success may not be linear; often it is quite a bumpy ride.
- When you must begin to assemble a team of talented individuals to help you grow your company exponentially.
- What you commit to the venture is often required for a longer period of time to build a truly remarkable organization.
- Who you surround yourself with to achieve success must be the answer to your weaknesses.
Podcast Transcript
JW:
Good morning. Oh, another beautiful Monday morning here on Live a Life By Design. You know, spring is my favorite time of year, the new beginning, new blossoms, a new opportunity. And for those of you, our loyal subscribers and listeners all over the world, 57 countries, I understand from our engineering team, thank you for your time and for your attention and listening. Our only goal here, as you know, is to help you become bigger, better, and bolder at whatever you wish to be in life. And today is someone as a guest on this show that I admire tremendously. I’ve got a lot of respect for this gentleman. He has done something in life that many of us only aspire to do, but he’s actually turned it into reality before we get to him though, I wanna to talk a little bit about what he did in life, and he’s gonna fill in the details to really make his success story so unique. Most companies you hear about of the size, I’m about to introduce to you are in New York city, major metropolitan areas, LA wherever Miami, they’re not normally in smaller co communities of a population of less than 12,000 people. You heard me correct. This company is reaches all over the entire United States and is influential in the entire world of it’s the market. This company has a great opportunity for people like me. So I’m gonna tell you today a little bit about the company that I work with and partner with as a wealth advisor, the company’s name is Cambridge investment research, and this happens to be the 40th year anniversary of the company. It started out with just our guest and a handful of good people that knew what they were wanted to do in the world to make the world a better place. And they now have as of last fall, 1.3, 1 billion with a B dollars of revenue and assets under advisement of $155 billion there’s countries on the planet that wish they had such dollars in their treasury I assure you. But with that said, I want to now introduce the founder and chairman of the board of this wonderful institution. I’m so proud to be a part of his name is Eric Schwartz. He started out in life like most of us raised in smaller town, up in New York and gravitated toward Iowa. During his younger years, he’s gonna give you a little background of why he became successful. And how do you end up in Iowa from New York? He’s gonna talk a little bit about that as we go through this process today. But the few words I would use to describe Eric Schwartz is visionary. He is a person that looked at within himself and said, I just wanted to create something wonderful. I just wanted to build something wonderful. And with that said, he set out on this 40 year journey, not knowing he would go to over 200 times the size of the company he started with that said, I do wanna welcome as my guest today. And I call him his favorite goal and role for me, his friend and business partner. Welcome Eric. Good morning.
ES:
Well, thanks Jim. It’s a pleasure to be here and I love to talk about success and how people con achieve their own, whatever that means for them. So jump right in and we’ll have some fun.
JW:
Absolutely. So I know you’re a busy person all, but I do wanna go back a little bit in your childhood a little bit to say, what, what was Eric Schwartz like as a child that equipped him with the possibility of being a chairman of one of the leading dealer and financial solution firms in the world?
ES:
Well, from looking at it that way, I’m not sure somehow it just happened perhaps, but I will say that I got in interested in investing when I was 10 years old. I was a very introverted person. I was quiet and, but I had liked numbers ever since I was a couple years old. And the cleaning lady taught me how to add and subtract one afternoon which was a pretty big surprise to my mom when she came home. But so I always had a fascination with numbers and it got me interested in looking at stocks and I actually bought up my first stock when I was 10 years old. But so that was my start, but it certainly wasn’t anything indicative that I would have the kind of success that I have had. And certainly even my, I certainly would never have expected it.
JW:
Well, I’ve gotta ask. So I’m guessing that first stock you picked, is it like Peter Lynch? You know, you buy the, at first big one, everything’s gonna move and it goes in the wrong direction. Or did you have a successful share?
ES:
Well, the first stock I was following about 20 stocks in my little game of pretending to buy and sell. And when one of them tripled in seven weeks, I told my dad and he bought it the next day. He, it tripled again and in between my mom had bought and sold it. My dad sold it. And then four days later, the securities and exchange commission de took it delisted it for illegal manipulation, fortunately not by me but that’s who I first got started. But then my dad gave, gave me a tip when I was 10, something called Ben get mines and I bought a hundred dollars worth. And when it got to $130 worth, I sold, I, I now have figured out that my dad must have paid the commission because I actually still had something left at the end. That’s sort of how it all started. And then I got busy with other things in life, but about 10, 15 years later, I got back into, I always had a fascination with investing. So I got back into it. And that started the journey.
JW:
Yeah. For those of you that would like to know more information about Eric’s wonderful past and, and the past of Cambridge investment research, I will have the show notes, the website for you to go to at C two.com is the website, but we’ll have it in our show notes. It’s a fascinating story. Great video there, Eric of your history. I know that our, our esteem CEO, Amy Weber, dear friend of mine as well, she helped record. And we got to learn some secrets about you. So I, I didn’t realize you had facial hair like that, man. You had like a big beard and everything back in the seventies.
ES:
Well, you know, growing up in the late sixties, early seventies, if you didn’t have longish hair, you’d probably, they’d probably throw you out at the, of the dorm you were at at school. Well, of course depends on where you, what part of the country you were. But yes, I did have some hair now. I don’t even have hair in my head, let alone on my chin. So what can we
JW:
Say? My brother says he just has more face than me, Eric is what he says, but anyway, oh, that’s what it is. So, Hey, real quickly, let’s talk a little bit about your mentors before we get into your story, how you got to where you are and what you do, what, who were some of your mentors in life as you grew up and who are some of those mentors now? Cause I think we all, we all need mentors in our life to show us the way and to keep us accountable.
ES:
Well, you know, it’s thinks a little different from me than some people because I actually never had a full, full time job before I started this company. My only job was a summer job in charge of paper boys, but I was making a dollar 65 an hour. So it was pretty lucrative. But so in many cases you have a mentor who would maybe in the, you know, whatever business you started in or, or whatever. So in my case, it was more sort of theoretical mentors and they were not in the business world. Initially if I thought of who I wanted to most be like, it would be somebody by Christ or Buddha or Gandhi who changed a whole country without firing a shot or people like that. And which doesn’t seem to fit with business very much. But growing up in the period I did business was like, the evil empire was like, oh, you don’t wanna be one of those industrial military complex people.
ES:
You want to be for a better world, you know, flower power and all those things. So it was sort of a different era, I would say today while I still admire very much, the people like just mentioned, certainly I look at people like Steve jobs, apple computers Elon Musk, people that really went out and changed the world and seemed to be able to bend reality to their will and really move the world forward in very creative ways. I’ve never been quite like that, but I am good at is seeing a trend very early and then jumping a board and making the most of it and trying to do it in a better kinder way so to speak than some of our competitors. It’s all about the bottom line. So trying to bring a positive flavor, like somewhat some of the great spiritual leaders that I mentioned to do to do business in a way that some people say, well, that’s not how you should do business.
ES:
And I think we have found, and Jimmy, you certainly have honored this in your career that when you treat people well and try to follow spiritual principle. And I don’t mean, I don’t wanna say one religion versus another, but there’s certain basic principles of, I would say all religions and all people of good will that if you follow those principles in the short run, you may not do as well, but in the long run, it pays off. So I sort of tried to put those things together, the great business minds, creative leaders with the great, whatever would you call it, spiritual leaders, leaders of mankind that found ways to do everything in a kinder, gentler more creative way that where everybody’s a winner, not that I win and you lose.
JW:
Yeah, absolutely. I’m a big believer in, it’s gotta be a win-win situation or we don’t to even start the venture, you know? So let’s talk a little bit about how you got started in those early years now, as I understand your story, you’ve told me at, at some of our meetings and conferences, I believe it was just you and about five other people, right? When you first started your company.
ES:
Well, when I started, it was me and one other person, one other person and we had some ups and downs for the, since I didn’t have a business background, I didn’t have an accounting background, legal background didn’t really have any logical reason to try to be in business for myself, just showed the sometimes ignorance is bliss. If you did knew what you were up against, you never would’ve taken the first step. So it took me about 10 years in the school of hard knocks to get all the way up to those five employees that you heard about and so what happened? You mentioned Iowa. I moved to Iowa in 1992. So our business had been going for about 12 years, but during those 12 years, not surprisingly not knowing anything, when I started not having any finances, we just barely kept our head above water. Although some days I think we were partly underwater , but we managed to survive. And then, and I got enough knowledge. And when I moved to Iowa, that’s when we had, we hired five people. When we brought one, I brought one person with me, hired three people. We had five people and we started there today. We have 870 people in employees run what we would call the back office, the operations of the company. And then we have about 3,700 financial advisors like yourself. Well, none of, of course are as glorious
JW:
As you. Well, now we can’t all be at the top. The pyramid with you, Eric. That’s all I know, friend, just two of us.
ES:
But anyway, we have 300 and mean 3,700 advisors, you know, some have 40 years of experience and deal with, you know, the high and mighty other people are just getting started and working with people on their small IRAs and everything in between. So it’s been an incredible run. And the amazing thing about is we didn’t really have anything special. We have lot, we have hundreds of competitors that basically could have done exactly what we’ve done. Some of ’em were a hundred times our size, some were owned by some of the largest companies in the world. Yet, somehow we managed to rise to very near the top. And I think my mostly was some of the things we were just talking about earlier that it’s just treating people really well, going the extra mile for them and just coming in every day and figuring out what can we do today? That’s great for our clients.
JW:
You know, one of the things we say in our office have two offices here in Oklahoma Tulsa and our smaller community Macer where I’m from, which is not too unlike Fairfield, the home headquarters of, of Cambridge investment research. We have 20,000 people here. We’re about double the size or not quite double the size of Fairfield. But what I tell our team, literally every team meeting every week is if we are spending more, more money on trying to gain clients than we are spending on earning our client’s trust, we’ve missed the boat. We need to be delivering trust. We need to be delivering dependable service. That’s the highest quality and this, to be honest with people. And that has worked very well for us. I tell people all the time we grow about 39 to 40% a year over year revenue, because we’re just doing that. We just practice kindness as a Gandhi with his ESP too. Right. There’s a lot can be done in a passive mode that doesn’t have fire any bullets to get something great accomplished. But, but let me ask you a couple of questions about this. If you had to say what’s the typical day of Eric Schwartz now compared to Eric Schwartz just 20 years ago, what would you say is the differences of that day for you?
ES:
Right. Well, today I’m 68 and I made a conscious decision about 15 years ago that rather in say the classical work like crazy until you’re 65 and then one day just stop that I would prefer to start gradually phasing down. And rather than being, looking like you go straight across and then fall off a cliff in terms of your hours, it gradually declines. So if I was working 50 hours a week, 20 years ago, that when I was 80, maybe I’d be working five hours a week. So sort of a triangle gradually declining. That was partly because my wife developed cancer around that time. And if she was having a bad day or a good day, then that might affect, oh, we can go out to lunch or, oh no, we have to go see the doctor. And I wanted to have that flexibility, an amazing thing.
ES:
A lot of times things you do for one reason you discover there was another reason to have done them that you didn’t realize. And in that case, it made the company much stronger cuz it didn’t, they couldn’t always get a hold of me and make sure I gave the final word. So people got empowered to take responsibility themselves. They had the skills, but they’d always step in my office and double check instead they would do it. And we’d check about in later on and maybe tweak it or whatever at first. But so the main difference now is that I’m working about half time and gradually phasing down and back then I was, you know, as my, my wife used to say I was on two phones at any given time. And you know, it was like impossible to talk to me. And you know about something that wasn’t like on the phone.
ES:
So basically, so what I did was about five years ago, I stepped down as the CEO and now I’m called executive chairman. And so part of it is I get to do what I like to do everything I was either not good at, or I didn’t like to do somebody else is doing and that’s great cause they do it better than me. And then I get to do the things that I enjoy, which is why I’m still doing it. I get to focus on the big picture, the being chief inspirational officer, so to speak. You get to a point your career where it’s like, how do I make more people have the kind of success I had? I shouldn’t say make them have it, but inspire them to have it to, or, but their definition of success could be totally different of course, but just guiding people in the right direction.
ES:
What they think is the right direction is great for. So mostly these days, the other big thing is the buck doesn’t stop with me anymore. So to speak, the other people have to make the decisions. I’m a little more like a consultant, even though I, from a ownership point of view, I control it so I could veto everything. Anybody else says I’ve long ago realized that we build on consensus and I have one vote out of the nine votes that decide things in the company. And that’s great cuz it feels a little bit more like quasi retired in terms of not having the pressure of gotta make that decision at nine o’clock at night, say, okay, I’m done. You all figure it out. So it’s an, but I’m still involved and I can bring some of the wisdom, knowledge, whatever that I’ve gained over the years to make just whenever’s appropriate. But I also know I could go for a year and the company would still be running and they might be running better for all. I know
JW:
I don’t wanna tell you this, but your team back the home office, Amy and the, and the other team on the exec team, they may actually have fewer problems if you’re away. That’s what my team tells me. I take a month off every August, I do a sabbatical and I come back and usually don’t laugh. Eric. They office is in much better shape than when I left and they go, you know, all of our distractions went away when you went away. So I hope you don’t do that. Hey, let me ask you this. There’s a rumor about Amy Weber and I’ve tried to squelch it, but I’m also the one that started. I don’t think she ever sleeps. I get emails from her sometimes late at night, sometimes four or five in the morning. Is she nocturnal?
ES:
I don’t think she’s no, actually I think she’s sort of an early to bed early to rise person. But I know like if she’s on an airplane, she’ll be typing away all these emails and then when she lands, you know, they all get sent out. But one thing about Amy, no, Amy. When we originally hired her basically I hired her to be the, that I would, as the, what as the person that was dreaming up, all the new ideas, talking to who potential clients, potential financial advisors. I was the one who would go out and say, yes, we can do that. And then I’d come back and tell her, I just promised we can do this. So go make it happen. Yeah. So to some degree I was the sales vision and all that. And then she actually had to make it, which to me is like 10 times harder.
ES:
So she had a great skill with that in personally, she can get done about three times as much in a day, anyone I’ve ever met. Obviously now that she’s running a company with 900 employees and 3,700 advisors, she has to delegate a lot and so on, but she’s amazingly proficient to a lot done. And certainly it wouldn’t be surprising to me to see emails showing up at any time from her. Cuz she I know when, when her kids were young, she’d be at the football game or wherever sh a mom should be, but she’d be up in this with her laptop punching stuff out because she had, she was leading a double life, so to speak
JW:
Oh man, I, I don’t doubt that she and I hope she listed this podcast and I want her to know it’s tremendous business partner, Erica, both you and she or wonderful business partners for us. But I let’s take it back now to something a little bit more about your more granular success if I may. So what are the top areas or functions that you followed to provide you with the highest probability of success and, and why were these important to you? Like, do you, do you think there’s like one or two things you did that kept this company on the path that it has now has reached it’s up, up in the, you know, the echelons of success?
ES:
Yeah, well, you know, I think the, it started with the core values at, when they first started, we didn’t have an as official core values. It was 10 years later, we decided to name ’em so that other people in the organization would live by ’em. But they were just the way we were running the company based on how I grew up. And those for our integrity, commitment, flexibility, and kindness, and especially in the financial services were, or not a lot of people talk about kindness in particular. People always talk about integrity. It’s just a question of whether they actually live it or not. You know, we all have our own definition of it, perhaps. But flexibility was a word that this was always, I always wanted to make people happy and you can’t make well happy if you don’t, aren’t flexible.
ES:
Cuz then you’re basically saying my way or the highway, we sort of figured the difference was between us and our competitors is most of our competitors, they have a certain platform. They want you to use. Maybe there’s 10 different places. You could put a client’s money, but there’s one that makes the company the most money. So obviously they either mandate that you put the money there, but, or they encourage it very strongly. And my view is, well, why don’t we give the people what they want, if there’s a reason that you or your clients want to use ABC, if it’s legal and it’s a quality situation and all that, we should try to figure out how to say yes rather than force you to use something that makes us twice as much money. So it’s a little less or a lot less profitable to us.
ES:
But what it did is there’s a lot of advisors like yourself, who they have a very strong idea, what they thinks best for their clients. They don’t want to go to a firm. That’s gonna force them to do it in a way that’s not best for their client. So as long as you can convince us is best for your client. Then we sort of figured, we have to say yes, and sometimes that’s complicated in a highly regulated business like ours. But that was really what I started out trying to do. So basically the flexibility and the kindness go together, cuz if you’re not flexible, you can’t be kind. I I’m gonna be kind to you. I’m gonna make you put it, do everything my way.
JW:
But do it in a kind way.
ES:
Yeah, but I’m gonna be nice about it. Like if you I’ll give you two days to, before I fire, if you don’t do it. So basically those two are very core and it’s not that any of our competitors would say, no, we’re not flexible or we’re not kind, but basically you have a business model and you’re not. If you go into a Ford dealer, they’re not gonna say, Hey, this year Chevys are really better. So why don’t you go across the street? It’s their job to sell what their job to sell. It there’s nothing the illegal or IM moral about that. But in our world where the financial advisor or king in our mind, as far as they’re the one that knows the client really well knows what the client needs. It’s kind of I, it’s not in our viewpoint that we should be telling you and your client what they should be buying.
ES:
So basically that was a very big difference. And the result was our profit margins have always been less than our competitors, but we grew faster than almost every one of our competitors. So there’s companies that were a hundred times our size back in when we in 1992, for example, 30 years ago, plus, or minus that we’re now several times their size. Yeah, their margins are still better than our, but we grew because we attracted advisors and their clients who wanted to do it their way in what was best for them and not be forced into a small box. So really what we did is we had flexibility and we were willing to listen the customer, the customer being both that financial advisor or financial professional and, and their client they’ll and try to say yes to them rather than convincing them to buy whatever it was that would make us the most money.
JW:
So Eric, you’re gonna laugh. I a lot of people will ask some of my call colleagues that I’m talking to ’em about Cambridge and so forth. And I haven’t brought up the name of Cambridge yet and they’ll say, well, who’s your broker dealer. And I go, well, I, I don’t have a broker dealer. I’ve got a business partner and they’ll look at me real funny. And I said, that’s a different mentality. I have, I had a broker dealer until 2009. When I moved to Cambridge, I finally got a business partner and I’m not say, and that being disen, I’m saying to you that that’s just how I look at it. I have input on how to do things that are best for our client. We’re fiduciaries on our end, just like at Cambridge, we wanna do the right thing. But, but what you said about flexibility that could not occur if it weren’t for the mindset predestined by you and the management team, when we started this company to, to get it where it is today and have that opportunity for those people like me to serve our clients in the highest level possible.
JW:
So that’s great foresight on your, on your your end of that.
ES:
So, well, I think the term partnership is one. We use a lot as well. And that’s different, you know, no one thinks they’re a partner with Amazon. Amazon’s a great company, but if I’m buying something from them, I don’t think of them as a partner. I admire what they’ve built and it’s a great product and I’m happy to use it, but we really try to be different than our very large competitors by being more of a partner. And I’m glad you’re feeling that on your end because that’s what gets people to me. That’s the fun part is working together with people to make something better versus, okay. We know everything. And we’re gonna tell you how to run your business or your investment portfolio.
JW:
Well, what would you do, Eric? Let’s glance back. And what would you do differently with the Eric of 1990, with the knowledge you have of the Eric of 2022 for your company? What would you have done differently than if you had the same knowledge you did today?
ES:
Oh, well, if it was two thou it was 1980. I would’ve probably said don’t go cause the first 12 years were so painful. But you know, I have to say that yeah, there’s been little twists and turns that we could have been wiser about, but mostly it’s been such a magical life since then. That there’s not a lot. I would undo. I would say that I’m a kind of person that just sticks with things and stays with it. And sometimes that’s served me really well, cuz we’re still here and we’ve grown, but sometimes maybe I held on to the past a little too much and didn’t move forward. Quick enough on other things I moved ahead very quickly. You know, there was a time when this business was a hundred percent commission based, you know, you sell somebody, something, you get a percent percentage commission up front.
ES:
And now as you know, it’s moved towards about seven 70% of our revenue and our advisor’s revenue comes from an ongoing fee. Typically, you know, somewhere around 1%, a little less, a little more depending on what’s going on. And so early adopters of that, it was a really great move for us at the time. So sometimes I was sort of ahead of the curve like that and I wish there were more of those cases cuz sometimes I would jar. I’d only figure out that something that other people were doing stuff five or 10 years later and say, gee, I should have been paying more attention. So I would say that when I did really well was when I saw a trend really early, I didn’t invent a trend, but I would see a trend and go, wow, this could, it could really be big.
ES:
And I jumped on it like with fees and all of a sudden in that particular case, we grew, we were growing a hundred percent a year for a while there. And that wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t gotten on that particular that trend early. So I’d say, you know, if you’re a student of the area that you’re going to be in business in, you know, find even one trend or even better, if there’s two or three that really you think you can make work, then what you do is you put a little money on that. You see how it goes and if it works, you just keep doubling down. We’ve been doubling down on fees for 30 years and kind of boring, but it’s really, what’s transformed the company and made us a leader in the industry rather than a follower.
JW:
You know, it’s what it is. It appears to be a boring process. But to those of us in the world that use it on a daily basis and work with our teams behind the scenes at Cambridge it’s pretty exciting to us to see the growth we experie right along with you. So it’s a, it’s a, that win-win combination again. Right. So let me ask you, why, why is it important for you to leave a legacy in the field of financial solutions and, and wealth advisement?
ES:
Yeah. Well, for me legacy doesn’t mean that my name on the building or like, you know, I, I don’t think that’s really the legacy that matters to me, but to me, we like to think we’re doing a lot of good directly and indirectly through people like you that are associated with us. And the legacy I’d like to see leave is keeping on that the company or spinoff from it or whatever that more good continues to get done for as long as it’s meant to be. And so I think, you know, again, making the world a little better place, people say, I would like to leave it a better place than we’re, you know, where it was. But I also, you know, empowering all of the next generation to go to even a higher level. And I wanted to go back to something earlier on you talked, used the word boldly you know, about the importance of being bold and so on. And I wanted, I often talk about the and when it comes to like doubling down on a trend and I’ll, I go back to star Trek, which of course is to some people almost like the Bible, you know, the, I I’m joking now. Of course, yes. There
JW:
You go. Oh, oh, I’m, I’m a Trek from way back, sir.
ES:
The original James Kirk. So yeah. So to boldly go where no man has gone before. But I always say, but before you go, you better do one of those spectrometer readings to make sure that there’s actually an at sphere there and not some kind of animal that will eat you as soon as you land. So to boldly go where you, no, man’s gone before, but first, you know, check some things out and the way you do that is you tiptoe into it. I never had enough money to say, okay, we’re gonna drop a pile of money. Cuz I think the future’s this way, I was never that. Sure. So always like, well geez, it looks like this fee business is really taking off. Let’s do more of that. So I started an ad that said fees are us back when a time when most advisors were doing 99% commissioning 1% fees, I focused on the fees because I didn’t think I compete with the 500 other firms that, you know, had already staked the ground for commissions.
ES:
Well, but I didn’t bet the farm, I bet $300 on an ad. And when that worked, I just kept on ramping it up. So to me, one of the key things in success and business, unless you’re infinitely wealthy is to be willing to be bold and go where no man’s gone before, but test the market a little bit first. And and that’s, what’s worked for us being bold at the same time, not being so sure that you’re right, not having such a big ego that you, you know, blow self up because you take risks that you didn’t need to take. Now there’s some people and I think to some degree jobs and, and Elon Musk are somewhat like that. They boldly went and they didn’t even bring a parachute. So God bless them. I, you know, I’m not quite a built of that. I I’m more, a little slow and steady, but be bold, but sort of test the waters first.
JW:
I, I think that is great advice. My dad, I was raised in rural America, Eric. So my dad on the farm would always say it’s hot in July and Oklahoma. And I mean, he can get to a hundred, 203 and he he’s higher. And you just wanna go jump in that water. You know, you see that water in that pond or that, that Creek or Riverbed, and you just wanna jump in there and cool off. And he always cautioned us. He said, fellas, he said, you don’t know what lies just below the surface, do not go in head first, wait out first, find your per, then you boys can have fun. And that’s kind of how I do business. I just kinda look at things on the perimeter where other people aren’t really doing certain things and, and Cambridge has done that, but you’ve done it on such a monumental level. Tell, tell me, what does the next phase of the career of Eric Schwartz’s executive chairman look like?
ES:
Well, again, since I’ve sort of started the next phase in a way, 15 years ago where I started gradually phasing down, it’s, it’s more of that same thing. So as I said, I’m 68, I’m already down to about half time. And most of that on the inspiring our team is inspiring the advisors level, and also just, you know, someone once referred to success in terms of pattern recognition and pattern recognition sometimes is hard to distinguish from what some people would call intuition, but like a chess master knows 5,000 positions on the board and the next 10 steps moves of what you do after a, a pretty good player knows 500 steps, five or positions and three steps. And then you and me, we each know like two positions and no steps, but the
JW:
That’s a bad ride for
ES:
Me. So to me, besides being inspiring and just sort of making sure the we’re pointed in to the, to the north star, so to speak I think of it as I’ve been around long enough to have a lot of pattern recognition. So I try to be inspirational, see the big trends and then try to again, have enough pattern recognition that we don’t make a mistake that we don’t need to. So basically I see myself over the next 10 or 15 years phasing down from 20 hours down to eventually maybe three or five. And again, mainly in that role of just making a little bit of inspiration and a little bit of pattern recognition and let the others be way more successful than I ever have been. I think some people sort of feel like, well, once they leave the company, it should fail just so they can feel good that they were so important. And I’d much rather the day I retire. I’d like to think that, you know, three years later says, Hey, where’s that Eric Schwartz guy. Oh, he retired three ago. Oh, okay. Yeah. Like, you know, they, that I’m not missed.
JW:
That’s exactly right. That’s good leadership though. Eric, I will tell you, you, you talk about the chess master. I’m reminded of a Bruce Lee statement that one of his quotes, I love it. He says, I fear not the man that knows 5,000 kicks and he can do ’em all once. I, but I do have great fear of the man that knows one mighty kick that he’s practiced 5,000 times. That’s see the point there. That’s that’s powerful. Yes. All right. Last, last question. We’re gonna wrap this up for you, sir. I know your time’s very valuable. If you could leave our listeners with just one statement of advice about influence leadership, legacy, whatever, what would that be?
ES:
I’d say the best way to lead is by example, just be real, be humble and see people for all the potential they have and what you can do to help them unfold. It that has been sort of how I, I didn’t, I wouldn’t have put it in words, but that’s what I’ve done for a long time. And I know to me, that’s how you influence the most people is to help them unfold them, them isn’t gonna be you it’s gonna be different. Right? Absolutely. And I think, you know, and we’re seeing that in the United States and the world right now, there’s all kinds of different lifestyles. People that think something’s black and other people, I think it’s right to me, it’s all gray. And it’s all as you know, our tagline for our company, which applies to our advisors and so on is you control the journey. So to me, it’s helping inspire people to control their own journey and to help. And our job is to help them get there. So that’s whether it’s Cambridge as a company or you helping your clients control their journey to, and or whether it’s just mentoring and leading, leaving a better world, it’s all about helping other people control their journey.
JW:
That that was very well said. My friend, I I want to add one addendum to, before we close out here is that Eric doesn’t realize it that many of us, 3,700 strong and growing may I add of Cambridge financial professionals? The reason we can continue the growth we have, my friend is we can see that next mountain that we wish to achieve because we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, just like you and the good folks at Cambridge. Thank you for joining me today, Eric, it has truly been a pleasure and I gained a lot of insight from these few moments with you. So thank you so much. I hope you have a wonderful 20, 22 filled with great health prosperity and prosperity at live life by design, sir, it doesn’t necess it mean material wealth. It just means good wisdom and good health. Sharing that with others. Thank you for joining us today and do have a wonderful, wonderful week.
ES:
Thank you, Jimmy.
JW:
One of the key challenges in life, you heard Eric talk about that he overcame was, he said, I didn’t have all the financial back round. I didn’t even have all the finances to do what I wanted to do, but he had a vision. He had persistence in mind with a great intellect to say, I’m gonna surround myself with great people. And we all have the same mindset to serve those around us. Then we will find success. Our challenge to you this week is to do just that. Sit down for a moment. Find that quiet spot. If you have to put on headphones, put on the headphones, just get a quiet spot somewhere and think a few moments of what you truly, you want out of life. And then as you heard Eric say, go boldly in that direction. Thank you for joining us. We’ll see you right here next week on Live a Life By Design.
