[EO Chicago] Lessons on Leadership, Legacy, and Learning With Ben Altman
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 16:29
I’ll pull that up as you’re talking about it.
Ben Altman: 16:30
Speaking of the whole context, sure, I give the whole context of it. And then I say, you know, role might be expert, financial advisor and tax accountants, you know, in this subject or something like that. And then the interview questions I say this is this is key. Ask me up to three questions, one at a time. Let’s see here.
Ask me up to three questions one at a time. Yeah. Oh to gain a deeper understanding of of the subject. So that’s a standard line that I put in there. So three questions one at a time to gain a deeper understanding.
And then let’s see here and then the task. What are you trying to accomplish. So you say hey I want to I want to I want to write a piece on the mega backdoor Roth and, you know, help me formulate one, or I want a script for a video that I’m making, you know? So that’s been a game changer. I’m glad that I’m now I’m.
I think it’s actually cool that you didn’t know what it was, because I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:42
Know I didn’t. I’m pulling it up here as we’re talking. It says create context role interview task. And so this is written by Joe Pulizzi. Actually, I had him on the podcast many years ago.
And but this is more recent. So yeah, I’ll have to give this a look, but it’s amazing. So you’re like contacts and you talk about role and then the interview and then the task.
Ben Altman: 18:08
Yeah. So act as a strategy coach who helps creators uncover blind spots and identify leverage points others miss. That’s that’s that’s a role. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:18
He quotes Jeff Woods by the way in this in the author. Yep.
Ben Altman: 18:21
Yep. Look at that. It’s so so the key the key here is to get chat to ask us questions versus us asking it questions. And if we think about it, if we’re talking to a client and we’re helping them solve something, we don’t start by talking. We start by listening, right.
And then and of course asking questions so that we can listen. So it makes sense. I mean, it’s how we operate. Why would we not do that in the AI space? This is a game changer for me.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:52
Yeah. No.
Ben Altman: 18:53
Go ahead.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:54
No I was going to say, you know, I know you’re thinking a lot about AI, but also about, you know, you’re very big on growth, but growth kind of underlying growth when I observe you is relationships. Can you just talk about some of the ways that you think about and follow up and build relationships with people?
Ben Altman: 19:17
Yeah. Let’s see. Number one, do what you say you’re going to do that. All we have is our word, right? So if we do that repeatedly we enhance our relationships.
Another one I would take from EO and Ypo is. Speaking from experience, which I didn’t realize, like I was doing, that I thought it was controversial to say, hey, well, when I took out my home equity line and blah blah blah, like, I didn’t know that that was actually a technique that leads to longevity in relationships. Fact. Okay. Is, hey, in my experience versus you should do this.
How annoying was it the last time somebody said you should do this? Do you want to do it or do you want to do the opposite? Right. So it depends on our personalities. But most most people don’t respond to that well.
And so when we are humble and we speak from experience, it it leads to longevity. I would say also just what makes us unique. We have a 60 minute rapid response time and a 24 hour resolution. If not, we give an ETA that’s agreed upon. And so that creates accountability.
It creates a service expectation. And then we meet monthly with all of our clients and so that it it like it just becomes a pleasure basically. So it’s, it’s like it’s like running a doctor’s office in a way where kind of financial doctors. So we have it like it’s a tight appointment schedule. We’ve got five advisors at this point at Altman Advisors that are client facing.
We’ve got seven that are registered. And yeah, that’s. Those are some of the tidbits. I think just knowing the details of people’s lives too. I’m not a detail detail person, but I’m, I’m I’m detailed enough.
I’m selectively detailed. They call it a more big picture. But I can get detail. And I’m kind of like a social, analytical type. I’m a little bit of an odd bird in that way, because most, most times we’re either analytical or we are social type.
I’m somewhere in the middle where I’m selectively social, and I’m also selectively detailed or conforming. So it because of that, I drive just the way I think. I a funny trait I’m 84% less patient than the general population. Okay.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:53
So how do you quantify that.
Ben Altman: 21:56
Well there’s it’s like two standard deviations basically. But it’s through culture index, which is something else that we use that has really taught us about ourselves. So my impatience drives detail because I want I want to get something done. And so that’s when I dive into it. But the key is like knowing the details of, of of if we’re talking about clients, about their lives, you know, knowing all just remembering.
And, you know, hey, when that happened in 2016 or 2008 or, you know, just knowing the history is priceless. I think, in the, in the eyes of the client. So I.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:36
Think.
Ben Altman: 22:37
Those are some of them.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 22:37
I had a question. Ben, what sticks out to me is, you know, working with family can be interesting. So I’d love to hear what it’s like working with your dad and some of the lessons learned before you go into that. One thing you said reminded me, which is do what you say. One of my favorite books is The Four Agreements, and it’s very short, so I try and listen to it every single year.
But essentially it’s. Be impeccable with your word. Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions and always do your best. And it’s just a reminder for me.
So thanks for that reminder.
Ben Altman: 23:19
Let me hear those four again.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:20
Be impeccable with your word, which is kind of what you say. Like do what you say you’re going to do. Right, right. Don’t take anything. Don’t take anything personally.
That’s a difficult one for me. I mean, like, it could be just driving in the car and someone cuts you off, right? And it’s like, oh, maybe they’re just in a rush. Maybe their wife’s pregnant. They’re driving to the hospital, I don’t know, like so the other ones don’t make assumptions, right?
Ben Altman: 23:46
We say you lose people with assumptions.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 23:48
Yeah. And then the last is always do your best because the best could be different. The book. It makes me think, okay, like, if I’m not feeling well that day, my best is going to be different than if I got a good night’s sleep and everything like that. So it’s just doing your best for that given moment or situation, right?
Ben Altman: 24:05
It’s all that you can do. Yeah, I consider that like the one option basically is okay. If our one option is to succeed, then you know, we’re going to do the best we can and that’s all we can do. You know, that’s that’s you can’t do more than that. And you and if you’re if you’re in it, you’re in it to win it.
Which is what happened when I started with my father. I knew that this was a long term decision. I was 23. He was 63. We’re 40 years apart and I am now.
I’ll be 46 on Saturday, so that’s half my life. I cannot believe it. 23 years, right? And I mean full time. I started when I was 18 with him, but 18, 20 I worked with him.
But 23 is when I started full time, and I knew it was a one way road when I was doing like, I’m this is you going all in like, this is, this is I have a job to do, which is to figure out how to continue this business, you know, on my own, which is, you know, that that that ultimately, yeah, I can get into some of the details of what it was like to go ahead. Yeah. But yeah, The first thing I did well, it was a kind of a change of plans. I was not he. My father taught me that many things, but he taught me specifically.
The hardest thing in business is to grow the business. Okay. Get a new client. Nothing starts until a sale is made. IBM like, which is in that little timeline the.
So he said, don’t work for me. You’re 20. That was 22 at the time. Graduated college. And he’s like don’t come work for me.
Meanwhile, my my Cuban Jewish mother is like work for you have to work for papi and da da da da. You know, you can picture my mom is over here and my dad’s pushing me going like this, and but he he’s really he really was directing me to build my network. And so I was working at a bank. I speak Spanish, so I got a job giving loans to individuals that don’t speak English. And it was this is 2002.
It was it was with the whole issue of redlining and where we were lending and not lending. So I was hired as a bilingual worker that could help and I could help translate for.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:56
Did you grow up speaking Spanish because your mom spoke to you growing up? Or.
Ben Altman: 27:01
You know, I have you know, what happened was my brother, my older brother was so confused that he was delayed. He had delayed speech. And they this was before ESL. So English, English as a second language. This is the 70s, right?
So they didn’t want to admit him into school into into even, you know, into preschool or whatnot. So now there’s programs and so on. But we heard three languages in one sentence because we were really my parents were both working and my grandfather lived about two blocks away. And. Interesting dude.
He was born in 1902 and he had lived in. Three different continents. He was a refugee multiple times and once from Europe and then again from Cuba. So he spent about 40 years in Cuba, made a wonderful life for himself. And and then he uprooted again when he realized, interesting going back to mortgage.
He he knew he knew what it was because Castro wasn’t originally an outspoken communist, okay? It became opportunistic for him. Che Guevara was and and Raul was, but not not not Fidel. And. But he was an opportunist.
And eventually the house that my grandfather built in Santos Suarez, which is a suburb of Havana. Didn’t have a mortgage payment. And you know the old phrase, if it seems too good to be true? It probably is. He’s like, oh man, I don’t have a mortgage payment.
Guess what? I don’t own my house anymore. Okay. So he knew that it was it was a it was a takeover. It was it particularly affected the middle class, upper middle class and middle class.
The upper upper society was became part of government and so on. And then it left a very rich and poor scenario. The middle class all came to, you know, that’s why we have Miami and Las Vegas now. It’s because Havana closed and Miami and Las Vegas Opened. I mean, Miami and Las Vegas were nothing before the Cuban revolution, basically.
So that was that was this is all like ingrained in me. And he raised me. He certainly didn’t speak English. I have no idea how he communicated. He would speak English, Yiddish and Spanish in the same sentence, okay.
Because he would use whatever word came to him. So it has something to do with like I have very I really love languages and.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:57
I’m sure you picked it up at a young age.
Ben Altman: 30:01
I just didn’t it wasn’t. I had to really the real reason I speak it, the reason I’m telling you that story is because when I came around, they said, speak to him in English because my brother had problems learning English. And so I really had to learn it. I learned it in school and then and then the kicker is, and I recommend this for anyone from experience is to spend a year immersive in two semesters immersive in. I did Spain, Madrid and that’s how I really dialed it in, you know?
So keeping it up, you gotta you gotta travel. Sorry. You gotta travel to Spanish speaking countries. You’ve got to speak Spanish. I speak Spanish every day with with my executive assistant, Franca.
She’s from Argentina. So it’s to me, it’s like a priceless benefit of working with with somebody from South America.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 30:54
So talk about a couple lessons from your dad over the years.
Ben Altman: 30:58
Okay, I. Don’t. I’ll say it. Don’t. This is a very simple one.
So we lost everything, like at least once. Okay. Where we were started at zero again. It was 1989 and United was was it was a sure thing. Okay.
And by the way, whenever it’s a sure thing, it’s not a sure thing. It’s usually the opposite Whenever there’s a consensus, it’s wrong. Okay, that’s something he would say. And so united in American we’re going to merge. It was a sure deal.
The entire office levered up borrowed on their houses, borrowed in their accounts to buy for the merger. Guess what happened. The merger never happened. People literally went negative. Okay, forget losing money.
You can go negative. So that was a that was twofold lesson. One was concentration which causes chaos. Two was is leverage. So imagine a comment.
You’re already you’re already taking crazy risks with concentration. And then you do it on leverage. That’s like you know it’s nuts. So that that was a lesson we we as a family, we lost everything restarted in 1990 I was ten. And yeah, that’s that’s a lesson that really stuck with me.
Actually one I learned, which was very similar, was I just remember he always said to me, you know, if he gave me a dollar, he would say, we’re putting $0.50 in the bank, okay. And I remember that I’m doing it now with my kids. My kids reminded me like, like I, you know, I said something like that. And, you know, when I had a bar mitzvah, I didn’t, you know, there was no like, I he took the money, he put it into an account. And by the time I was 18, it was $10,000.
Okay. And, you know, over, over, over those, I guess, five years of growth and whatever we put in there before that. And. I worked for him in that year. I remember I was I interned with him two years later I interned again with him.
It was the year 2000. Okay. What happened in the year 2000?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:28
Dot com. crash.com.
Ben Altman: 33:30
Com. So guess what the 10,000 had turned into. From 1998 to 2000.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 33:39
I guess it depends what you’re invested in, I don’t know.
Ben Altman: 33:41
It’s like for tech stocks, it’s like Sun Microsystems and I don’t know what else. Okay. Adobe I think Adobe was one of them. Maybe Microsoft I remember Sun Microsystems. So I have four stocks right.
And now now I told you what it is. So what did the 10,000 turn into. There’s no I’ll tell you the right answer 2000.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:07
I don’t know.
Ben Altman: 34:08
A hundred thousand, 100,000. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 34:11
I guess certain tech stocks went down. Those ones went up.
Ben Altman: 34:15
I haven’t gotten to the down part yet. I’ll tell you what it eventually got to. So from 98 to the year 2000, it went from $10,000 to $100,000. Okay. Ten-x.
And. I’m like, hey, pop, should we, like, maybe sell these things? Like do something. He’s like, no, it’s fine. It’s like good.
You know, you don’t see the future. Right. That’s the funny thing about markets is that they humble you and you have to go through bear markets to understand the market. In fact, we say you have to go through two bear markets to understand the market. Otherwise you really don’t understand the market.
You got to go through bear markets. So that’s when you test you learn. And so. Yeah that was my first experience with a with a dramatic deep bear market. The the Nasdaq was down 60%.
You know it’s just you have. So what happened by the time by the time 20. Let’s see here 2003 came around. I’m now working with my dad full time. Take a guess what it was.
What it was down to.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:27
I’ll say 5000.
Ben Altman: 35:29
Close 10,000. It was back.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 35:31
It was back down.
Ben Altman: 35:32
It was back down to 10. So I started with 10k, you know. And you know, that was, that’s the way. And I appreciate how he raised me. He wanted me to be hungry. And so he wanted to limit what I would have. And you know, he didn’t pay me much. I think I was making $35,000 a year or something like that, and I was just working. And, you know, the funny thing is, we talk about my father a lot, but my mother was really even an even bigger influence to me in business initially. She was a licensed clinical social worker for like 50 years, one of the first Spanish-speaking in the city of Chicago, like 1960s.
And she taught me to have that social service mentality, basically, and that my father would say, like, the worst people in our business are the ones that are focusing on what they make. If you focus on doing good things, good things happen, right? So these are all things that I’m, you know, I’m thinking about. But basically I just went in with this kind of like altruistic. I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t really I wasn’t making anything off of it. Like I had my like 35K salary or whatever I started with, and that was because I had no compensation. And my job was just , to take care of people. We ended up, you know, going from we were the top producers at UBS in our office was a small office, and then later they combined all the offices. I remember we were number seven and six, five, four.
We ended up getting to number one again, and it was just from like grinding. It was work. I worked long hours, I did the best I could, and before I knew it, we had 250 clients, and we were the top producers at UBS Wealth Management in Chicago. So that was that was that was the interesting thing is that I was still even though we were ‘the top producers”. Right.
We really didn’t. I had a growth problem. If you have 250 clients and you’re working from 8 a.m. to midnight, setting up a bond trade before the morning, and then you got 25 to 30 phone calls a day because you’re handling so many people. How do you grow? And so an interesting thing.
I’ll grab one more book. Let’s see here. This is a big influence for me. This is a big influence. It’s The Supernova Advisor. So this is the other thing that really influenced my business. And he said, basically, you’ve got to give away the bottom 5% of revenue. You would not believe out of 250 clients, that was 100 clients. Okay, I think it was 5 million. And we ended up creating a minimum. That was 3 million at the time, and we got three $5 million deposits after giving away five. How could you give away 5 million with 100 people? One client replaced it. And then I did it two more times. And the reason I did it is because of Supernova.
Supernova told me meet monthly with your people two times in person, anywhere in the country. And so that’s what I did. And I’ve been doing it since 2015. I’m now in my 11th year of this. It is unbelievable. I’ve taught it to the team. We run it like clockwork, and it changes your business from being a reactive business, which is most businesses, to a proactive business where you actually have a life and you might have some time to market selfishly. You know, you have a structured life and then you have some off time. Well guess what? You got to grow too.
That’s another thing that we think about. We would say if you’re not growing, you’re dying. Okay. There’s like two directions. There’s no there’s no like, hey, I’m just going to coast.
If you’re coasting, you’re going down. So it’s that mentality was.
Outro: 39:59
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