Ep. 135: James Burton - Crisis can lead to Opportunity

Contact James Burton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcburton/

Personal Capital: https://www.personalcapital.com/

Advisory services are offered for a fee by Personal Capital Advisors Corporation (“PCAC”), a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. You may lose money. PCAC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Personal Capital Corporation (“PCC”), an Empower company. PCC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Empower Holdings, LLC. © 2021 Personal Capital Corporation.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:00):

Welcome back to Count Me In. IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Adam Larson, and I'm here to bring you episode 135 of our series with featured guest, James Burton. In the wealth management space, a few can claim to have accomplished more than James, a 20 year veteran of the industry, he has held executive, management, and C-level positions at some of the most respected financial institutions in the world. He now serves as Chief Growth Officer at fintech trailblazer, Personal Finance, and joins Count Me In to talk about how to turn a crisis into opportunity. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.

Mitch (00:50):

So James, obviously the global pandemic of 2020 caused a crisis for many businesses. A lot of our listeners felt this impact. For you personally, I'd like to start off our conversation by just having you explain, how did you help clients and organizations navigate through these difficult times, particularly in the beginning?

James (01:09):

Yeah thanks, Mitchell. You know, something like a pandemic and the initial market slump that it caused, that really, that really makes you reconsider everything, right? All your assumptions about your business model, your strategy, your growth opportunities, trying to see into the future. And naturally many of our clients went through very similar reflections about their goals and their financial situations, and they had a lot of questions about the future too. And the demand for advice, financial advice and expert support definitely increased. And in this case, it turned out that our company, Personal Capital, we were highly prepared for the crisis because we already had a hybrid digital and human model advisory model is technology enabled to operate remotely. So in a very general sense, we just stuck to our knitting. That's a British term, I think, meaning, we stayed on strategy and we continued interacting with our clients and supporting them through their financial concerns during the pandemic, particularly in those early, very stressful months. But we also made a very crucial pivot to getting everyone to remote working, from home literally overnight. And we could do that because of how the company was designed and built. So, you know, the result was that despite the initial market slump that we went through, we actually saw strong growth last year. People want advice. They want to holistic advice and they mostly don't want to travel to a brick and mortar building or office with wood panels, you know, nice little offices. They certainly didn't want to travel during a pandemic, right. And now, you know, a year later they know that in fact they don't need to go any further than their kitchen or the home office, to work with us. So we were able to help them, right away and we were able to help them remotely, which was great.

Mitch (03:14):

And now, you know, kind of building on this conversation a little bit, in leading up to our recording today, I was told that you follow a quote from Winston Churchill. It's a bit of a mantra and if I can just read the quote, "never let a good crisis go to waste". So, to help explain for our listeners here, why, what does that mean to you? How, do you go about using that as a mantra?

James (03:37):

Yeah, so Winston Churchill, he certainly produced a lot of great motivational quotes and I do particularly like that one, "never let a good crisis go to waste". I find myself using it a lot actually. And, you know, a good crisis, is very often a great opportunity. And that's because it's when you're forced to reconsider everything, you know, all your assumptions, your business model, your strategy, your opportunities, even your very survival sometimes. A really good crisis puts all of that in the picture. And as a result, it's often when meaningful change is initiated and it's when we move forward from the past, you know, to the future way of thinking. And in the case of our company, as I mentioned, we found that as it happened, we designed and prepared very well for the lockdown and we could commit to this virtual first approach. And as a result, we've proved beyond doubt that virtual financial advice works very well. If you have the right technology and business model and it's here to stay. So a great crisis here, which it really was, and in many ways still is, you know, helped us prove that and move into a future where, you know, advice can look very different for Americans.

Mitch (04:55):

And now we are, you know, roughly 16, 17 months through this, you know, it's been a year and a half and, you mentioned going into the future a little bit more, not every bad thing that happens is a crisis necessarily for business, right? We don't always face something like the COVID-19 pandemic. How can this mantra, this quote still apply on a daily basis, you know, once we kind of returned to normal or the new normal, however you want to refer to it. Can you give us some examples and some response options for the daily ups and downs of business and responding this way?

James (05:31):

Sure, sure Mitchell, and look, you know, certainly these have been some strange and scary times in the past year. But you know, it's exciting to look into the future and see things improving. I'm definitely happy to share some examples, but, you know, as I've thought about this, as you point out, you know, real crises and real opportunities, they're not exactly daily events, you know, thank goodness. They tend to come along just when you think everything's going great in your business, like maybe early 2020 for example. So every few years you may get a really good crisis, you know, something really challenging or bad happens in the environment or, you know, in your business. I've got some examples of how to put, you know, a good crisis to work, but I have to mention that they're not really day to day examples, they're how to really harness the big situations. So if you'll indulge me, I'll happily proceed, but, you know, I generally wouldn't use an expression like, "never let a good crisis go to waste", in the day-to-day environments, right. That's just doing our jobs. So I'm happy to proceed with, you know, let's just say longer term, bigger picture examples. I'll go for it.

Mitch (06:48):

Absolutely. Yes, please do.

James (06:50):

That's great. So, first of all, I could go back in the time machine, maybe about 20 years. And, at the time I was working for a well-known stock broker based here in San Francisco, and the company had experienced huge growth in the late 1990s. And then along came the crisis, the tech bubble burst in 2000. For anybody who was active in the markets at that time...