Here we are at episode number 204 of the weekly Wealth Podcast.

I hope that you enjoy it.

We are talking to David Steele today and we are going to learn some business success principles.

So don't forget to subscribe to the program on the platform where you listen to it and don't forget to tell your friends, your family, your colleague and your co workers about the show.

This is going to be a fun one.

And here we go.

Welcome to the Weekly Wealth Podcast.

I am certified financial planner David Chudick.

This podcast and my wealth management practice are both designed to help the mass affluent to live better lives by how they handle their money.

We talk about financial strategies, prosperous mindsets and simply how to build true wealth.

So come on and let's enjoy this journey together.

Welcome to this week's episode of the Weekly Wealth Podcast.

My name is David Chudick and we have another David on the line with us.

We have David Steele and he's the founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors.

That's a wealth management firm that manages over a billion dollars.

He's also a serial entrepreneur with a passion for building venture ventures across sectors, including acclaimed restaurants in San Francisco, arts organizations and community based fitness spaces.

David's unique journey combines finance, creativity and philanthropy, offering valuable insights into building sustainable wealth.

So I love sustainable wealth.

Hey David, how are you?

I'm great.

Thanks for having me today.

Two things.

We have two things in common.

Number one, our first names.

I am so bad remembering people's first names.

I'll meet somebody at a networking group and I'll remember everything that they said and I forget their name.

So I'm not going to forget your name.

And then apparently at one point in our lives, we were both fairly decent tennis players.

A couple years ago, I gave up on my goal of becoming the oldest and fattest Wimbledon champion.

I think it's probably never going to happen at this point, but I still love getting out on the tennis court and sometimes I hit some good balls, sometimes I don't.

Tell me about your tennis career.

What sort of a tennis player are you?

It's funny, I was, yeah, I was the top tennis player for my high school and which is to say my high school was an average tennis, had an average tennis team because my record was about 500 when I was playing.

But that just meant nobody was better than me in that high school.

And then I went to a Division 1 school for my undergraduate and I probably wasn't good enough really to be an actual player in that team.

I did have a buddy of mine who was the top player on that team.

And I was his practice dummy in the off season.

And when I would hit the ball with him, I look like a pro because he would put the ball in a one foot box, 100 shots in a row and with perfect top spin.

It was great.

Anyway, I stopped playing tennis right after college.

I did some tournaments through college and realized I was not happy playing because I was so hard on myself because my ground strokes were a thing of beauty.

I look like a professional player.

And then I hit the ball five times and it would go over the fence and it just frustrated me too much.

I never actually had fun playing tennis.

It sounds like you did and do have fun playing tennis to me.

I call it like yellow ball therapy.

You know, you have a rough week, you go out to have some buddies hit some tennis balls, you still live in that fantasy world that, that you're awesome.

What can be humiliating is if you've ever watched yourself on video, you look nothing like you thought you look like.

I love the one handed backhand.

Like I, in my mind, my backhand was smoother than Federers until of course, I saw it and then I'm like, yeah, that's not good.

So one of the best things, and it's actually almost a financial plan principle, is sometimes you gotta look at the facts, not what you think the facts are.

So look at what your stroke is actually doing by looking at a video of it, and then you can make adjustments.

And sometimes I think that clients, they tend not to make financial decisions based on facts.

They make decisions on maybe what they think is or what they think should be, but not on actual facts.

So yeah.

So let's talk about some core principles that have guided you across some of these industries.

These are big industries, the restaurant business.

Don't they say one of the best ways to go broke is to open up a restaurant?

It's a pretty, pretty tight margin and a pretty tough industry.

So what are some of your principles that can guide the entrepreneurs that are listening to the weekly wealth podcast to build and maintain wealth and have some success in business?

My day job is a wealth management financial planning company.

And I did nothing but that for 15, 16 years.

I started the practice over 30 years ago, but when I went to launch the restaurant company, it was really, I had to scratch an itch.

After having worked in restaurants all through high school and college, I had to open one and see if I could do it.

And I didn't realize this until looking back and reflecting upon it, but the work I did for the business plan, the strategic planning process was darn near identical to the work that I had always done with private clients and financial planning, which is, what are the goals, what is the current situation, What's a realistic progress you can make along the way towards achieving those goals?

What's a sensible strategy?

What's a conservative way to execute on the strategy?

What does discipline mean?

What does it look like?

I brought all of those things to my first entrepreneurial endeavor, which was the first restaurant I opened, and it was really successful.

My hypothesis around why restaurants have a higher probability of failing is not that it's necessarily a harder business, but it's because the wrong capital finds the wrong people.

What do I believe?

That restaurants are very exciting, they're very sexy.

As a result of that, everybody who has wealth, who knows, who loves eating at restaurants, fantasizes about winning one someday, but understands that they don't have the time or the knowledge to do it.

And so there's a lot of capital out there, surplus capital out there that finds its way into the restaurant space.

And naturally people, the first place they, if they hear about an opportunity to invest in a restaurant, it's usually a chef who doesn't really have business principles, fundamental business principles.

They have a, what I call an abstract relationship with capital.

They don't understand that twenty thousand dollar stove, in fact is twice as risky as the ten thousand dollars stove.

And a darn well better result and more cash flow for the restaurant to justify that $20,000 stove, or the chandelier, or the table or the silver or whatever it is.

Whereas if you bring more pragmatic business principles to opening a restaurant, my guess is the failure rate is probably not that different than any other business that doesn't quite so easily attract capital.

So I always say that business owners and managers, they're typically very good at skill.

So your chef loves cooking, but cooking and running a profitable restaurant are two vastly different skills, Right?

I know how to cook and I can cook in, in my house.

But managing the staff and everything else are two different things.

How did you find?

Because I think, or at least the stereotype is that the restaurant industry is very difficult to staff.

So how do you staff a kitchen?

How do you staff the back of the house, which are typically not incredibly high, highly paid positions, or do you have to figure out a way to make them highly paid?

Really, it's very regional and very.

It depends upon what the regions and the sub regions regulations are like.

For example, California minimum wage is higher and in San Francisco specifically benefits are required to be paid.

That is to say, you have to pay, you have to provide people health insurance.

So which would have you say that makes it that much harder to open a restaurant?

True.

That is just your labor costs are higher because of those things.

And yeah, our back of the house team is probably paid higher than maybe teams are in the rest of the country.

But guess what, it's way more expensive to eat at restaurants in San Francisco than it is most other parts of the country.

So hopefully you're able to pass that on to the consumer.

And hopefully the consumer is in cahoots with you and the state on and the local geographic area.

You're on cahoots on what it costs to provide all of this.

I'll take a step back with restaurants or any business.

If you want to scale the business, you have to have teams.

And for me, when I opened the first restaurant, I knew instinctively I'd have a chef whose job it isn't to cook, it's to manage people cooking.

My chefs don't cook.

They manage people.

Cooks cook, sometimes sous chefs cook.

But chefs, executive chef partners don't really cook.

And I had a front of the house and back of the house chef and GM who were my partners in the business and I handled strategy and they, it was their problem frankly to handle the staffing and the details of the staffing.

And so by having that division of labor, we were able to focus on our specialties.

What type of restaurants are you involved in?

Are these high end fine dining or anything in between?

Yeah, I would say mostly it's not, it's the highest end.

Fine dining is a Michelin three star place that's you're going to spend in a city 500 a person to get out the door at the end of the meal and then, and the very low end is, I don't know, fast food McDonald's, which is going to be maybe $8 to get out the door.

There's lots of in between.

I would say we're, we're fine dining but not tasting menu, not super expensive places.

So I think it's probably our check average is about 70 or $75 per person to walk out the door with.

A good meal in our part of the country.

I'm in South Carolina, not far from Atlanta.

70 to 100 is going to be fine dining.

That's going to be about as nice as you find.

But I guess wages are lower here as well.

So there's always, always, always that balance.

Looking with some of the entrepreneurs that you've worked with.

What are some of the mistakes that you've seen entre make that's negatively impacted their just their wealth, their ability to save, their ability to build wealth, their ability to build generational wealth.

I think I I'm very critical of our culture now as it relates to access to information, social media, the way we digest consume information.

It's so rapid fire.

And what has always been appealing is for people to read about success stories and is rarely appealing for anybody to read about failures unless they're such dramatic failures that it's newsworthy.

Where I'm what I'm getting at is we are exposed to a lot of stories around what seems like overnight success on occasionally there is overnight success and what it does, I think it creates envy and FOMO for people and it pushes entrepreneurs or maybe even individuals in terms of wealth building decision making into making more risky decisions to take into its extreme.

People borrow to then make risky decisions because what they're trying to achieve is a high probability of failure or rather low probability of success approach if it wins big.

This is also the venture capital industry doesn't do entrepreneurs any favors either because they're really pushing for this what's called the power law, which is they want fail fast is a saying in the venture capital world.

And they will fund 20 or 30 investments in a particular portfolio or fund that they raised and they want an outcome quickly on those.

And what it ends up doing is it forces entrepreneurs to to take risk, to swing for the fences, to get that hockey stick like type of result.

And if they fail the VC is fine because that was part of the power law.

That is one one out of 20 is a big success and that's enough to make the math of the whole portfolio actually work well.

But the problem is that the 19 failures in that scenario is super traumatic for the entrepreneur.

And so what I and this is my own values I when I am doing any type of consulting with an entrepreneur, I really try to push them towards planning for a generational type of business rather than a business that they're trying to grow really quickly and have an exit from.

I'm not saying people should never sell their companies if that's what their ultimate choice is.

But I don't think they out of the gate should be planning the creation of the business in the name of trying to sell it.

I think that's the wrong goal.

And the right goal is to build it the right way generationally.

And then many years in the future you'll probably have the option to sell the Business.

Absolutely.

A strong business is a sellable business, but it's also a profitable business over the long term.

Exactly.

And so what are the goals?

And so I never borrow money personally.

I borrow money for mortgage debt because that's quote unquote, good debt if it's in balance.

But my businesses don't owe a penny.

I try to dissuade from people from borrowing money.

A few years ago, people said I was crazy when interest rates were at 2 or 3%.

You can get corporate borrowing for 5% back then, or 6%, which was really cheap.

And you in fact could have reinvested that capital and probably had a positive rate of return.

But there's one way to go bankrupt and that's owe somebody something.

And it's almost impossible to go bankrupt if you don't owe anybody anything.

So if we're talking about a privately held business that does not have venture capital backing, how would you almost advise them to look at risk?

Right.

Because we have to take some risk or else we never grow.

But I have seen businesses just risk way too much to where if this deal or if this venture does not work out, there is no plan B.

So how do you look at risk for businesses that are self funded or maybe they have a little bit of debt, but they're not venture capital backed?

Let's talk about my financial planning business.

You're.

You have a financial planning business, so you'll understand.

Do you do people's tax returns?

We do not prepare tax returns now.

Okay.

Because my company, we're contemplating actually launching a tax practice.

Because what I have found anecdotally is that there's very few people wanting to become CPAs at the exact same tax codes are getting more complicated.

And so I'm finding CPAs are older, not liking their jobs, and I'm generalizing now.

Taking on too many clients because they can make money.

Haven't adjusted their comp structure for the what they charge people.

They don't have enough support staff.

They've been trained.

They're still doing 20, 21 returns.

It's a complete hot mess.

And so I'm actually contemplating launching a tax practice.

One of the ways to do this is to acquire an accountancy company.

Okay.

That's a lot of risk.

We probably don't have the cash to do it.

We'd probably have to raise equity capital or borrow money.

It's an interesting conversation though.

We're probably going to hire a young CPA, pay a seasoned CPA to look over that young CPA's tax returns only do 20 year one, maybe 30 year two.

And five years later we've got a seasoned CPA who can maybe train a junior then.

And 10 years later we're going to have a legitimate tax practice.

I'm not sure which is right or wrong.

I do know that if we acquired an accountancy practice it would be more risky and we'd probably have more short term upside, maybe more long term upside with symbiosis.

But I do think that the second scenario for us would be a lot less risky, but it's going to take longer.

So I don't know if that answers your question, but it's one of the ways I think about risk by analogy.

Yeah.

Because even in my business there are times it's time to hire somebody.

But of course hiring there's a risk, there's the financial risk, there's a risk of even the time of bringing somebody new on board.

Not everybody works out.

So it's always been interesting for me to think like how much is the right amount of risk.

Then there's of course there's the other, the other philosophy of if you're taking the island, burn the boats when you get there because you don't have any way to retreat.

And then failure is not an option.

And that's great in like a story and a parable, but should your family always be have the threat of bankruptcy if it doesn't work out?

And so I don't know.

I think there are different ways to look at risk.

I think it's important to always say if this risk doesn't work out, what's the worst possible outcome?

And can I handle the worst possible outcome?

And if bankruptcy and losing your house is the worst possible outcome, that's reasonable to think.

I think that's not a risk you should take.

Yeah, I completely agree.

It's funny, whenever I have a potential consulting, entrepreneurial kind of consulting gig, which I've had five or six before, where I help an entrepreneur write a business plan and figure out how to capitalize the business and do organizational development work and that whole process, I begin asking them a series of financial planning questions I want to understand because they're not necessarily clients of ours in my financial planning company, but I bring that lens to pretty everything, pretty much everything I do.

So I'll ask them a bunch of financial planning questions and I'd say half the time I don't take them as a client because they don't have enough money, they have dependence, they can't actually afford to not have A job.

So everybody wants to be an entrepreneur in this day and age, but not everybody foundationally has the moment in their lives when they can and should take that risk.

So be careful.

And not everybody understands what the entrepreneurial journey is.

Not everybody understands that at least during seasons of your career, you may not get to put your head down at night and go to sleep without just worrying about what's happening in the new project and maybe some things that are not going well.

So there's a lot of rewards to being an entrepreneur and I would never trade it.

But I also think that especially when you see the highlight reels on social media, you don't realize the long hours that at least through part of their careers that entrepreneurs need to put in.

Now as you get to a certain point, you absolutely, absolutely need to be budgeting in staffing and to where you're not actively involved with the running of your business.

But sometimes it takes a little while to to get there.

What sort of active role do you play in your companies?

You're certainly not putting french fries in the fryer.

I'm a CEO of One Wealth Advisors which is the financial planning company where we manage $1.1 billion in assets for about 380 clients.

We work with and there's 12 team members and I'm CEO of that company.

So I'm primarily responsible setting strategy and making sure we're organized properly and we continue to evolve as a company.

I'm also an advisor for the company.

There's four advisors in of the 12 team members and one one wealth advisors the planet company and I probably have about 75 clients I actually do advisory work for.

So I really have two roles in the company is the way I see it.

And I spend about 70% of my time doing that.

And then with the restaurant company we have seven restaurants and a 250 employees and consumer packaged goods business and grocery stores.

I'm exec, I'm founder and executive chairman of that company.

And the way I see it is my number one responsibility is to be a CEO coach for the chef who we have evolved into being now the CEO of the company.

He was 24 when I hired him and he's 40 now and he's very capable of being an executive.

And so we have an exit.

We the way we're set up is we have an executive team meeting every two weeks or two hours and he runs that meeting and I'm in that meeting and then we have board meetings every quarter and I'm the executive chair and chair of the board.

And so I help run the, the quarterly board meetings.

It sounds like you're empowering people.

Then you're getting out of the way, building a culture.

But, but not micromanaging.

And I think a lot of business owners, you know, they stifle themselves by micromanaging and having to be involved with, with everything.

Yeah, the disease, I call it the disease of non scalability, which is the following statement.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

So how do you get out of that?

Especially when you're new?

Let's say I could imagine maybe you start a financial planning firm on your own.

So you are it, you're the planner, you're the marketer, you're the secretary, you're the bookkeeper, you're the janitor.

How do you get away from that to where you can build a scalable business?

Where you are maybe overseeing culture, building teams, but not necessarily involved in the day to day.

There's a few things.

First of all, keep your personal expenses as low as you possibly can to free up whatever surplus cash flow there is.

To quote unquote, invest it in the business.

So I have always had a philosophy of being conservative with my personal spending as it relates to my income, my capabilities and hiring in advance of need, not when you need it.

And always training my team to do, have other people do everything you can train them to do.

That is to say, I have a belief where I want to delegate 100% of everything I do to others.

What it's not possible, but one, but if you have that attitude, then what you're doing is you're little by little getting others to do things that are less dependent on your mastery and allowing you to focus more and more on the things that you have mastered that are.

It's harder to teach others to do.

It's also empowering your team with skills so as they take on the less complicated tasks you may delegate to them little by little, they're capable of taking out ever increasingly more complicated tasks.

And so you really are delegating and elevating you and then you're teaching them to delegate and elevate.

And that's how you build, I think, a scalable organization.

I love it.

Yeah, that scale word is one that you gotta get that one right or else you're just gonna be stuck in a small business that's really stressful and that is limited.

And I see that all the time.

Very smart entrepreneurs, they just, they never get past themselves.

So what about aspiring entrepreneurs?

What advice do you have for them on how they can use their financial success to positively impact their communities while staying true to their values.

Because for me, I like money.

I'm sure you like money.

But I also know that we need to impact the world.

So how can aspiring entrepreneurs impact the world positively?

There's so many ways.

One for me with the way I think about building my businesses is I really think about creating financial security for first and foremost my executive level people, which some listeners may take a little issue with what I just said, but I want my.

When Covid hit like for.

With my, for example, with my restaurant company, we unfortunately had to furlough every employee because they're just these are pass through entities legally and there wasn't a ton of cash to keep in the coffer that was in the coffers to be able to pay people.

But we didn't furlough the executive team of all of the restaurants because I knew that that company to have a chance in the future meant that the executive team, most importantly had to be solid, had to not be afraid of food and shelter.

They had to be solid.

We just couldn't afford to take care of everybody, unfortunately.

But when you get to the point where the executive team is solid financially, there has to be a culture of the executive team thinking about their teams and making sure they're set up financially.

And again, I think it does relate to scale.

But assuming we're not just talking about inside of the company and we're talking about our community and our world, the planet if you will, you most executives, most entrepreneurs that have had some or a lot of success probably don't really appreciate the mastery and the wisdom and the process and the discipline that is not natural to say, for example, nonprofit organizations.

So if you could, if you're a business person and you can join a board of a nonprofit organization you care a lot about, first of all, write them a check so you get their attention.

Write them a check, they're 501c3, it's tax deductible.

Write them a check.

And then when you get their attention with that check, if they ask you if you can ask them, hey, I'd love to help, possibly even joining the board if you have an opportunity for another board member.

And then when you get in there, start to disrupt because 99 out of 100 of them are not well operated.

They're not in the have a mindset of a scaling organization.

So I've been on multiple boards and I think one of the biggest impacts I've had is turning some of these non profit organizations into thinking a little bit more like businesses.

When it comes down to it, a non profit has to have income and it has to have expenses and the expenses have to be less than the income.

Just like your business.

And just like you and I personally, we can't, can't spend more than what, what we bring in.

It's really them have an attitude around growth though.

Right?

Okay.

So your revenues minus expenses have to be equal to each other to be a non profit.

I, I, unless you have an endowment, of course.

But I, I, so I agree with that.

I, I'm on the board of a nonprofit that helps young playwrights develop their playwriting career.

I'm really into the arts and that's one of the ways I give back.

And when I got involved in that organization, I said let's go triple the size of the revenues, which means we can triple the size of the expenses.

So some of them are just, they just get, they just protect what they have rather than thinking about growing.

And if there's a mission, the mission generally speaking should be to help.

If it's an arts organization, why not shoot to, to get to where you can help more artists or advance the arts even more.

And when I'm speaking with clients, I have a simple, simple formula.

Income minus expenses has to equal greater than zero.

We can do that two ways.

We can be Dave Ramsey and we can say eat beans and rice.

Don't see the inside of a restaurant until, unless it's your second job or and sometimes honestly that that may be where you are in life or the better option is to, let's figure out how to increase our value to the world so our income increases and then we don't have to count every penny and we'll still have margins.

So I think that works with restaurants, I think that works with individuals, I think that works with non profits is that we have to, we can focus on cutting and that's almost like that, that scarcity mentality.

Or we can focus on growing and then you don't have to count every penny.

And I quite frankly like it when cash flow is much higher and I don't have to count every penny as opposed to the proverbial beans and beans and rice diet.

I completely agree with you and you said scarcity is the former and I would call it an attitude of abundance as the latter.

I think abundance mindset, I think, and I know it's frou frou and people might say it's weird, but I really think that, like what you think and believe it affects what you do, and what you do affects what you become and what you get.

So if you're always scared and thinking there's just not enough for us, or even if you're thinking, you know what, people won't pay a high price for a good meal.

And then maybe that's why some restaurants go bank, go under because they're not, not charging enough because they don't believe in the value of their food, or people won't pay a financial planning fee or anything like that.

So I think that when we believe the right things, we do the right things and we end up getting the right things.

And I think that that's hugely important.

I believe with every cell in my being that my success and your success, it all starts between our ears.

The rest of it's pretty easy, but it's how we think is the start of it.

So I completely agree.

I love it.

I love it.

So we are the weekly wealth podcast.

And it's been interesting to talk to somebody who's an entrepreneur and has a similar path and some similar goals.

And we talk about the mindsets, the tactics and the strategies that can help you to build and maintain wealth.

So, David Steele, I would love to know what is your definition of wealth?

What does wealth mean to you and to the people in your life that you care about?

Out.

I think it begins with the mas, the concept Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

And are you confident that you're going to be housed and fed?

And if you're never really ever thinking about being housed and fed, it allows you to move to the next thing, which every time I talk to anybody I tried to express, which is I think human beings really only seek two things.

Being loved and valued and assuming that we're fed warm and dry.

If we're fed warm and dry and we know it's going to stay that way, I think the next place we go is we see being trying to be loved and valued.

And the way I define wealth for me and for anybody who is buying what I'm selling philosophically, which is if you're warm, fed and dry, just have a lot of love in your life and spend money on having love.

And I don't mean buying friends.

What I mean is spend money in ways that can create these type of exchanges with human beings.

You know, that's so important because I don't think it's really about the money, it's about what the money can do for us.

You mentioned the non profits.

I think we all should just Write a check to a nonprofit to the extent that we can, and that helps the world.

But I also think I was talking to you before the show that my wife and I, we went up to to New York and we watched the US Open and we spen probably an exorbitant amount of money.

But you know what?

That's why we work hard.

We had a great weekend.

We did something really cool.

And that's part of making the world a better place as well.

It's just doing cool things with the people that you love.

And then it's also about writing checks to charity.

It's about having our budgets and personal finances under control so we're not stressed.

And we're better parents and spouses and leaders.

When we're not stressed, we should all go out and we should say, how can I handle my money in the world in the way that makes the world a better place?

So that's my theory.

Spend less than you make and spend as much as you can.

And being with people you love, who you value and who value you.

Yep.

So somebody's listened to this podcast and you're thinking, hey, these are two pretty cool Davids.

They get to know me every week.

But if they wanted to learn more about you or find you online, where would they find David Steele?

I have a little website that we talked about two of my endeavors, but I do some other stuff as well, entrepreneurial and as on boards.

And I created a little website called it's davidsteel xyz.

D A V I D S T L E X Y Z davidsteel xyz and so you can find me there.

Awesome.

This is a cool episode.

I love talking about money mindsets.

I love talking about business ownership and entrepreneurialism because it's like a puzzle that never quite gets finished and you get a little bit of it solved and then another piece needs to be.

Needs to be fit in there.

And I love being an entrepreneur and I would never TR trade it, but it certainly does have some challenges.

David, I appreciate your advice and I appreciate your input.

Maybe one of these days our paths will cross cross and we'll get you to come out of tennis retirement and maybe I could run you back and forth and you could do do the same for me.

Sounds great.

I look forward to that day.

Awesome.

All right, everybody.

Until next episode, I wish everybody a blessed week.

Thanks, David.

Thank you.

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