June 6, 2024

Episode 308 - Dan Bortolotti: The Canadian Couch Potato

June 6, 2024

Dan began his career as a journalist, spending more than 20 years as an award-winning magazine writer and editor and publishing nine nonfiction books. He eventually specialized in writing about personal finance, with a focus on low-cost index investing. Canadian Couch Potato, Dan’s popular investing blog, debuted in 2010 and continues to be one of the most trusted resources in the country. His podcast of the same name launched in 2016 to bring the message to a wider audience.

Dan was introduced to the PWL Toronto team while working on an article for MoneySense magazine in 2012. Inspired by their approach, he joined PWL the following year so he could work directly with investors. Dan received his Certified Financial Planner and Chartered Investment Manager designations in 2015.

In 2021, Dan published Reboot Your Portfolio: 9 Steps to Successful Investing with ETFs, a guide for do-it-yourself index investors. When he’s away from the office, Dan enjoys audiobooks, staying fit, watching live music, cheering on the Blue Jays, and visiting the city’s restaurants with his wife, Wendy.

When it comes to DIY investing, there’s always a temptation to make things more complicated than they need to be. But, in reality, embracing simplicity is one of the best ways to ensure good investment outcomes. Today’s episode features an exceptional conversation with our long-time friend and colleague, Dan Bortolotti, who has worked alongside us as a Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital for over ten years. Some of our Canadian listeners might recognize Dan as the man behind the Canadian Couch Potato blog (one of the most popular resources for Canadian investors) and the voice behind the Canadian Couch Potato podcast. Dan is a consummate communicator, both on paper and in person; beyond his extensive blogging, he has also written a number of books, both fiction and non-fiction, the most recent of which includes Reboot Your Portfolio: 9 Steps to Successful Investing with ETFs. Dan has played a pivotal role in making PWL Capital what it is today, and in this episode, we learn about his surprising journey to becoming an advisor, before hearing his wide-ranging insights on DIY investing. Dan breaks down key components for investors, from how to approach your asset allocation and picking index funds to navigating fees, taxes, and performance. We also discuss how the investing landscape has changed since Dan started writing and essential lessons he has learned over the years. To hear all about investing from the Canadian Couch Potato himself, be sure to tune in for this expansive conversation!

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:03:52) The origin story of the Canadian Couch Potato blog, by Dan Bortolotti.

(0:08:17) How the availability of index funds in Canada has changed since Dan started writing about them in 2010, and his role in the index fund revolution.

(0:10:01) Why Canadians have been slower to adopt index funds than Americans.

(0:12:09) How the model portfolios on his site have changed over time.

(0:14:20) Why simplicity is so important to a good investment outcome.

(0:16:38) The biggest obstacle Dan has observed when it comes to successful investing.

(0:19:40) Advice on how to approach decisions around stocks, bonds, and asset allocation.

(0:24:34) How to select the ideal ETF or index fund to express your asset allocation.

(0:27:22) Some of the ways that Dan’s views have changed since starting the Couch Potato portfolio, and the evolution of his blog.

(0:31:46) Why you should be clear on your financial goals before investing and the importance of saving rate relative to fees and performance.

(0:37:32) Understanding the value of financial advice if we consider investing to be effectively solved by low-cost ETF mutual funds.

(0:40:23) Why it’s so important to close the gap between providing a financial plan and implementing it.

(0:43:25) What surprised Dan about his clients during his transition from blogger to advisor, and what he has learned about earning his clients’s trust.

(0:48:22) Dan’s thoughts on how people should make the decision between DIY investing or hiring an advisor, and what people should look for in a financial advisor.

(0:55:46) The story of how Dan connected with PWL Capital and the key ways he has helped shape the company.

Read The Transcript:

Ben Felix: This is the Rational Reminder Podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision-making from two Canadians. We are hosted by me, Benjamin Felix and Cameron Passmore, Portfolio Managers at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to Episode 308. This week is a very special episode for us. I'm sure you agree, Ben. We had a chance to have a great discussion with our long-time colleague, Dan Bortolotti. Dan is a name that I'm sure many Canadian listeners are aware of as. He's the person behind the Canadian Couch Potato blog, which then became one of Canada's most popular resources for investors in Canada. He also hosted for a number of years, the Canadian Couch Potato Podcast, which was wildly successful, and still very well-ranked, even though it hasn't had an episode out for a number of years.

But we had a just a terrific conversation. He's such a great communicator. Him and his colleagues in our Toronto office have been such an important part of our company's story, and he's just such a great thought leader in this space. His background of how we ended up here, which is a story he tells in this conversation is inspiring. The impact he wants to have.

Ben Felix: Yes. It really is. You said it, Cameron, it is a special episode for us, because like you also said, Dan really played a huge role in what PWL is today. The whole idea of creating content and giving really high-quality information away for free, really started with Justin and Dan. We talked about that, near the end of the episode, and I think to some extent, we've been able to continue with what they started. But it's really now in the DNA of who we are and what we're about and what people know us for. So yes, very cool to talk to Dan, about all kinds of things. But we also did talk about that at the end of the episode.

Cameron Passmore: I never realized that you and Dan joined right around the same time.

Ben Felix: Yes. I joined a little bit before then. So, I think at the time, when I joined Justin and Dan, we're doing a lot of writing together. Not long after that Dan joined the firm.

Cameron Passmore: So, Dan is a Portfolio Manager with our office in Toronto. He's also an author of many books, including most recently, Reboot Your Portfolio: 9 Steps to Successful Investing with ETFs. Plus, he has done a bunch of fiction and non-fiction books, which is pretty impressive.

Ben Felix: Yes. He wrote a very highly regarded book on the natural history of the blue whale, called Wild Blue. We talked about this during the episode. He's an incredible communicator, both written and spoken, but his writing, way before he was even interested in personal finance, which is something we talked about during the episode. He was a very highly regarded writer on topics such as the blue whale. Just interesting. His unbelievable writing abilities translate to topics other than personal finance.

Cameron Passmore: Yes. His path in becoming an advisor, this random walk, it wasn't a path he had planned out ahead of time. Just had these random events happen and something piqued his interest. He tells a story of how he met our colleagues in Toronto and the rest, as they say, is history. It's a really interesting story and is such a great communicator of value proposition of financial advice. What's it like to be a DIY investor? How to make that choice? Super interesting.

Ben Felix: Yes. To be clear, in the episode, we do talk about the background and Dan's story, but we also talk about investing, and fees, and taxes, and picking index funds and all that fun stuff, asset allocation, all that good stuff. Don't be concerned that you're going to get just a story.

Cameron Passmore: Yes, exactly. Okay. With that, let's go to our conversation with our colleague and good friend, Dan Borlotti.

***

Ben Felix: Dan Bortolotti, aka the Canadian Couch Potato. Welcome to the Rational Reminder Podcast.

Dan Bortolotti: Thanks for having me, guys.

Ben Felix: Super excited to be talking to you, Dan.

Cameron Passmore: Yes. Big times This is great. Thanks for coming down.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. My pleasure.

Ben Felix: So, to kick this off, and keeping in mind that some of our audience is not Canadian, so they may not know who you are. Can you talk about the origin story of the Canadian Couch Potato blog?

Dan Bortolotti: Yes, sure. So, I think we have to go back to about 2008, just the months before the great financial crisis. At the time, I was working as a full-time magazine writer, editor. I didn't have any real connection to personal finance. Even as a writer, it was certainly not my specialty. But I was doing a fair bit of work for MoneySense magazine, which at the time, I think was Canada's number one personal finance magazine. It's now just a website. But I was assigned to do a story or participate in a story that the magazine was doing. It was a lot of fun, actually. It was called The Seven Day Financial Makeover. We got three couples and one single person, all of whom were self-professed, basket cases when it came to personal finances. That maybe is unfair. A lot of them had experienced some difficult things in their lives and they were certainly having financial difficulty.

So, what we did was, we put all of them up in a hotel in downtown Toronto for a week, and over the course of the next few days, they sat in front of a different financial expert every day. We had somebody who worked with getting people out of debt, savings, in investing, et cetera. I was just there as a reporter to follow one of the couples. I was there every day for five days, listening to all of these workshops. I like to joke, I think I got more out of that workshop than any of the participants, because one of the things that turned me on during that session was the guy who came in to talk about investing. I should thank him for this. It's Norbert Schlenker, whose name lives on in Norbert’s Gambits, the well-known technique the DIY investors use for converting currency.

But in any case, he talked a lot about the importance of prudent investing. Specifically, he went on about index investing as a strategy to follow. I had some familiarity with the strategy at that point. In fact, MoneySense magazine had really brought the “couch potato” strategy to Canada before I was on the scene. I kind of co-opted the name later. But anyway, I learned a lot about investing at that session that really sort of turned me on to I started reading, everything I could get my hands on about it, and I immediately became a DIY investor myself, put all my portfolio and ETFs. Three months later, we had the worst financial crisis in a century. Cut the portfolio in half very quickly.

But this was actually I think part of the – what really happened here was, even though the portfolio got demolished in 2008, like everything else, I didn't abandon it, because I had just done all of this research saying that this is going to happen in the markets. You probably wouldn't have done any better had you tried to use active management or tried to time.

So, I stuck with the strategy. Then, by 2010, early 2010, I decided to write about it, because as I think you guys know, I mean, the best way to learn about something is to write about it, because it forces you to crystallize all of your thoughts in a coherent way. So, I launched the blog in 2010. As I said, it just kind of took that name, Canadian Couch Potato, referring to the strategy. Yes, that was the origin story. It took off pretty quickly from there.

Cameron Passmore: Such a great story. I didn't know all those pieces. That's great.

Ben Felix: If you had to guess, Dan, how many people do you think you've learned about index investing through your writing?

Dan Bortolotti: It's got to be in the tens of thousands, and I'm just going by things like book sales and web subscribers and things like that over the years. It's certainly, I think, the influence early on was great, because back in 2010, I mean, the financial blog space was really very different from what it is today, for sure. There wasn't really anybody else writing specifically or solely about the indexing strategy at that time. It did build a pretty big following in those early years, for sure.

Ben Felix: Can you talk about how the availability of index funds in Canada has changed since you started writing about them?

Dan Bortolotti: It's really changed dramatically. I mean, I would say for, let's start just by talking about ETFs. I mean, at the time in 2010, I mean, even Vanguard hadn't launched in Canada yet, and you had a very limited number of ETFs that were available to investors. If you wanted to build a portfolio of ETFs, you had no choice but to assemble that portfolio from multiple moving parts. Of course, that hasn't been the case for a number of years. Those model portfolios that quickly caught on with investors became really important because somebody had to point you to the specific products, in order to assemble a well-diversified portfolio, and give you some sense of what allocation you should put to each one. You don't have to do that anymore.

I think the other thing that's evolved a lot is index mutual funds. Because again, at the time, there was a lot of them around. All the banks had them. I think, they've mostly moved away from them as well. They've certainly changed their structure over the years. They've pretty much fallen out of the picture. Nobody really uses index mutual funds anymore, with the possible exception of the TD e-series version, but even they are not nearly as available as they used to be. So, that has really disappeared from the discussion and everybody's focused on ETFs now when it comes to product selection, if you're an index investor.

Cameron Passmore: You've been a big part of this index fund revolution for a number of years, as you've been describing, but we still have a long way to go. Certainly, compared to the Americans. Do you have any sense of what and why Canadians might be slower to adopt an indexing strategy?

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. I've thought a lot about that. I don't know that I have any data to back any of this up. But if I can just kind of share some anecdotal information about it, my sense is a couple of things. One is just simply the technology and availability in the sense that I think American investors have had the very good fortune to have been able to benefit from Vanguard for many years in ways that Canadians can't benefit from in the same way. If you're a US investor, you can open an account directly with Vanguard and invest through them without an intermediary.

Of course, we have Vanguard products here. But you've still got to open a brokerage account. You've got to buy the ETFs yourself. Just takes a little bit more hands-on involvement. I think, experienced DIY investors will look at that and say, “Oh, come on, how hard is it to just open a brokerage and buy an ETF?” The answer is, it's not that hard. But that is still a barrier for a lot of people. Whereas if you make that barrier a lot lower by allowing them to open an account directly with the fund provider, I think, that helps. So, part of it is just that.

But I think another part of it is a bit more cultural. I mean, as you guys know, I mean, Canadians have a bizarre loyalty to banks, which I just don't think you see in the US or many other countries. A lot of people just feel very comfortable investing with their bank, and as we all know, I don't want to rip on banks specifically, but they're not particularly well known for their low-cost investment services and their comprehensive client-based planning. So, I think it's very hard to get people away from that model. Certainly, you don't see any support for index investing in the passive strategies within the banking sphere. So, I think that's got a lot to do with it as well.

Ben Felix: Makes a lot of sense. You mentioned earlier how the product landscape has changed. Can you talk about how the couch potato model portfolios on your site have changed over time?

Dan Bortolotti: Yes, for sure. As I was saying, at the beginning, when 2010, or 2012, when you were trying to build a portfolio of ETFs, you really didn't have much choice, other than to buy a specific product for each asset class. So, you were looking at kind of a minimum of three, but more likely four, five, even six ETFs, and components in the portfolio. Again, how hard is it to buy a few funds and rebalance them from time to time? In theory, not that difficult. But in practice, it trips a lot of people up.

Now, of course, since the launch of the so-called asset allocation, ETFs, these kind of all-in-one portfolios that are made up of multiple ETFs are so much easier, and have made really the model portfolio exercise that I used to go through every year to kind of update which allocation made sense, in which individual funds were the lowest cost, and the most broadly diversified. That is not even necessary anymore for most investors. Certainly, if you're just getting started, and if your portfolio is kind of modestly sized, it's pretty hard to go wrong with these asset allocation ETFs. You just remove all of these decisions about trying to tweak percentages of this asset class versus that asset class. You just get everything in one fund and it's so low maintenance.

That's another problem I found, with a lot of do-it-yourself investors, kind of what tripped them up. They would start off fine. But the rebalancing the portfolio and maintaining it over time, especially if you have multiple accounts, was really what defeated them. So, this all-in-one solution has really taken that obstacle away as well. You could use them in all of your accounts, if you wanted to. Is it optimal? No. Is it good enough? For most people, yes. That I think has really removed a lot of the barriers for DIY portfolio construction.

Cameron Passmore: Can you talk about how important and I know this is very near and dear to you, how important simplicity is to a good investment outcome?

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. That's something that I've only come to appreciate over time. If you look back at some of the stuff that I wrote 15 years ago, you would not necessarily have seen a lot of simplicity there. I was really an advocate of trying to optimize and trying to think through all of the details in such a way that you could keep fees and taxes and everything else to an absolute minimum and all of that is still important. But what I learned over time is the simpler and more straightforward a portfolio is, the more likely you are to be able to maintain it. The more opportunities you give yourself to tinker, the worse of an outcome you're usually going to get.

I mean, let's start with the product selection right off the top. Again, we were saying, if you want to buy a diversified portfolio now, you can buy one ETF. Most people will probably do just fine with that. Previous to that, if you were buying individual asset classes, and you were saying, “Well, I need ETF for bonds. I need one for Canadian stocks, US stocks, international stocks, emerging markets. Why don't I add one for commodities? Why don't I add one for small cap? Why don't I add one for corporate bonds?” Once you go down that road, you end up with the Frankenstein portfolio, and you haven't really thought about how all of these pieces should fit together.

So, if you kind of sub out the portfolio construction to the people who create the asset allocation ETFs. They're very thoughtfully put together, by the way. That's a deceptive simplicity. If you stop cluttering your mind with those decisions, and you focus on what's really important, which is a goal-based plan, keeping your costs low, keeping your taxes manageable, saving regularly and sticking to the plan with discipline, you can focus all your energy on those things, which are so much more important than those other details. I think if you give somebody a simple plan, they're much more likely to follow it, and then they're much more likely to enjoy some success.

Ben Felix: Related to that, or to expand on that, based on your experience interacting with many DIY investors, what do you think is the biggest obstacle to successful investing for most people?

Dan Bortolotti: I would say the biggest obstacle overall, is not being content with what seems like a simple plan. I have seen it so many times. You put something in front of someone and say, “Look, this is a simple, easy-to-execute plan. It's very low cost. It's extremely well diversified and you should not have any difficulty in maintaining it.” You think that you've solved the problems. But humans are humans. So, even though we say we want simplicity, and we just want a path that we can follow when we're presented with that option. We so often want to complicate things.

So, we second-guess ourselves. We think, if it's simple, it must be simplistic. I mean, that's always been a problem with index investing, right? If it was this easy, why wouldn't everyone do it? Well, I don't know why everybody doesn't do it. It's basically the question you just asked is just behaviourally, we are not really built that way. So, the problem is no longer the industry. The problem is not fees are too high, because all of those problems are easy to get around. The solution is there. The problem now is getting people to understand that it is in fact, a solution, and it is in fact something that they can follow. It doesn't need to be complicated. It's really that kind of emotional and behavioural barrier that has become the only thing standing in the way of investor success now.

Ben Felix: But it's also awareness too, right? Our industry makes a lot of margin off of active, high-fee products. So, it's more than just the availability.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. It's true, for sure. I mean, we will often talk to prospective clients. Most people as you can imagine, who come to us have already been reading what we've been putting out for years and they already get it. But sometimes you get a referral, or sometimes you get somebody who comes to you without really a solid understanding of the investment philosophy, and it's a hard sell sometimes. What do you mean you don't pick stocks? What do you mean, you don't ask yourself is now a good time to invest? Or should I sit on the sidelines and wait? That's the playbook that they have been reading from for years.

It often takes a long time to get people to understand that a lot of the things that they have been doing for years. A lot of things that people have been telling them are important, are not in fact, as important as they think. But you're right. I mean, how can you come away from the financial media with any other message, other than investing is about what to buy now. And smart investors reposition their portfolio every six weeks based on economic forecasts. That's the message they get bombarded with. So, it's hard to blame anybody for coming away with any other impression.

Cameron Passmore: How do you suggest people approach the stock bond, asset allocation decision?

Dan Bortolotti: That's really one of the most important goals at the beginning of any investment plan, is figuring out that proper asset allocation for you. I've always really liked Larry Swedroe’s way of modelling this, which is, he says, you need to consider your ability, your willingness, and your need to take risk. Your ability is probably the easiest one. It's mostly about your time horizon. If you're saving for a down payment in two years, you don't have the same ability to take risk in the equity markets as someone who's going to retire in 30 years. The need to take risk is also just kind of something that you would compute.

You have a savings goal, a target of a number you want to hit. You know how much you're putting in every month or every year, and it's just simply the math of calculating how much return? Do you need a 4% return, or do you need a 9% return to get where you're going? Those are simple enough, I think. But for me, it really comes down to the willingness to take risk as the most important factor. Because if you only look at the other two, you could argue that any young investor with a time horizon of 20 years or more, should just be 100% stocks. I have seen that advice from a lot of people. You're told, why are you wasting your time with conservative investments like bonds, or GICs, you've got the time horizon to be all in stocks.

Again, that's true. If you're a robot, and you're going to have a 30-year time horizon, where you're never going to look at your portfolio, that's probably true. Most of us are not. So, we've all seen it, working with clients. I mean, lots of people who have the ability, and the need to take risk, and you've aligned that with their asset allocation. But if you're going to be sick to your stomach, every time the market falls 10%, you cannot be an aggressive investor. A lot of people simply don't know where they are on that spectrum until they have lived it, and that's one of the things that we certainly saw, kind of in the years, when I started the blog, like around 2009 onwards. Markets were very good for a long time and you had all kinds of people overestimating their risk tolerance. I don't know how those people ended up in 2022, for example.

So, I think that really, it comes down to what you can be comfortable with. If you look at your portfolio every day, and you probably shouldn't. But if you do, and it doesn't give you a heart attack every time you've seen it fall 5, 10, 15, or even 20% or 30%, then sure, be aggressive. But most of us are going to be somewhere on that balanced continuum. Somewhere between 30% and 80% stocks, I think, is the vast majority of people.

Ben Felix: We're in a weird time now. For people not having to have the opportunity to test how they'll respond to a proper bear market, because we had COVID, but it bounced back so fast. That wasn't so bad. It can get worse.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. It's so true. What’s funny, because I really feel like it's not so much the depth of a bear market. It's the length of a bear market. That is the bigger test. I wasn't in the market in any meaningful way and during dot com crash. But I can imagine, and as an advisor, can you imagine having those meetings with clients? We had three consecutive years of negative equity returns. That's tough to take. I mean, we can all get – I mean, “Hey, we have a bear market and three to six months of misery. But try doing that three years in a row. How many people were scared out of the market there for years, maybe forever? Then, they all missed the huge bull market that followed that before ’08 took it away again.

I think people don't always appreciate how painful those downturns can be. One of the things we always do when we speak to clients about assessing their risk is we don't talk about percentages. We talk about dollars. It has such a bigger impact. So, if you have a client, and even with a million dollars, and you say, how would you feel if a 20% decline? And people say, “Oh, well, that's a garden variety bear market. I'm fine with that.” You say, “How would you feel if you lost $200,000 next year?” “Well, that sounds a lot worse.” It's the same question. If you express it in terms that people can truly appreciate, in terms of dollars lost, I think they have a bit more of an appreciation for the effect you might have on them.

Ben Felix: That's a great point. Can you talk about how, and this is something that your blog, when it is so much detail. Back in the day, like you talked about, when someone's decided on the asset allocation, what actually goes into selecting the ETF or index fund that they should use to express that allocation?

Dan Bortolotti: In the old days there, that was pretty easy, right? If you wanted to buy a Canadian equity ETF, there was a couple available and they were all pretty similar. Nowadays, you have so many choices within individual asset classes. So, I think if you're going to be building a portfolio with individual ETFs now, as a do-it-yourself, your default choice or your starting point has to be the ETF that has the broadest coverage of that asset class, at the lowest cost, and with the fewest rules.

I mean, all index funds have some rules that they have to constrain. They can't just hold everything. I mean, if you want to use a specific example, let's say something like if you want to invest in US stocks, you got a lot of choices. But I think for most people, the best choice is going to be a total market index. So, it holds something in the order of 3,500 stocks. These days, it covers over 99% of the investable public markets in the US. You can get these funds for anywhere between three and 15 basis points fees.

Now, you bought the entire US market at remarkably low cost. Now, you can go a different route, you can buy the Dow Jones index and get 30 stocks, or you can buy the Nasdaq-100 and get 100, mostly tech stocks. A lot of people are going to look at performance and say, “Well, this one outperformed that one over the last five years. So, why wouldn't I get the best performer?” But if your goal, again, as an index investor, is to kind of buy the broadest market you can, then it doesn't make sense to look for ETFs that filter for a lot of specific things and end up giving you only a narrow cross-section, or only a narrow segment of the total market.

Then, you can apply that to the other asset classes as well. If you're buying a Canadian stock ETF, try to get one that covers the most broadest coverage of the Canadian market. International stocks, try to get one that covers the broadest market, and that includes large, mid, and small companies. If you can get all of that in a single ETF, with bonds, same sort of thing, mix of maturities, a mix of government and corporates. That to me is really about trying to get the broadest possible coverage at the lowest possible costs, and not imposing your own idiosyncratic rules on what you want to hold and what you don't.

Cameron Passmore: Exactly. I'm guessing a number of listeners remember the old Uber Tuber, Couch Potato portfolio, which was based largely on factor investing. Have your views on it changed since then?

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. There was a time there, when I was creating model portfolios that even I fell prey to this idea that well, why just present a simple portfolio of three or four funds? There's all kinds of other specific strategies you might want to target. So, I had like a high-yield portfolio, and the one that I called the Uber Tuber was in the ultimate index portfolio, broke it down even further. So, it had access to kind of small-cap and value stocks. I think it had real estate in that in there.

Again, it was a kind of an attempt to get even more diversification, and it was also based on the research being done and shown that tilting towards factors like value and small could increase your returns over time. I put that one together. I honestly have no idea how many people actually followed it, because it was pretty complicated. I believe it was at least 10 ETFs and I would say it was kind of a thought experiment. But as I was saying earlier, over the years, I've just come to understand that trying to split hairs like that and trying to create more complexity, in pursuit of higher returns, usually ends up in disappointment.

I mean, that's not something I would ever recommend anymore, and if you were interested in a portfolio that tilted the factors, there's way more efficient ways of doing it than a portfolio like that.

Ben Felix: I've talked to a few people that have implemented the Uber Tuber. At least two, maybe.

Dan Bortolotti: Okay. Some of those funds don't even exist anymore. I wonder how it evolved over time.

Ben Felix: Yes, interesting question. It has been cool, though, to see the evolution on the blog, of you alluded to this earlier, trying to optimize a lot of different things and writing about it incredibly, then it's transitioned over time to simplicity, which is reflected in the blog now.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. I think that's just a matter of information and knowledge evolving into wisdom. I mean, I think they're kind of different things. I also think that there's very different incentives and motivations when you are a writer versus when you're an advisor. So, when I was doing the blog full-time, I was doing two blog posts a week, and they were pretty detailed for the most part. It was a lot of work. When you're writing two blog posts a week, you can't write, keep it simple, hold, stay the course. I mean, that gets boring very quickly, and that explains a lot of the financial media. You can’t just write that message over and over. It's boring. No one wants to read it. Even if it's wise and prudent and all the rest.

Then, when you're an advisor, so you got a couple of things going on. One, you no longer really care about coming up with new information twice a week. You want to focus on what you're doing every day. But the other thing is, you realize all of these, like your audience, as a writer is often unclear to you. Certainly, you get comments from people, but when you're actually working with real families, you start to understand, this really isn't that important to them is it? If I tried to have some argument with the family that I work with about some academic study that showed some certain exposure to this, or that factor might lead to 20 basis points of higher returns, it doesn't matter to them. It doesn't make any difference in their life.

So, you start to realize, okay, I'm going to focus on the things that actually make a real difference to people. A lot of that starts to drift away from investing and into planning. I was talking with somebody about this the other day that we will sometimes have review meetings where we're having this discussion with a client for 90 minutes, and then at the end of its like, “I guess we should talk about the portfolio.” We go over the performance and really look at the holdings, but they're not preoccupied with it. That's not to say that we don't care very deeply about returns. Of course, we do. But to drill into the nitty gritty of it ends up not really being what most people, I think, get value from the relationship.

Ben Felix: Yes, totally. That's been our experience, too. Related to that. Can you talk about how important it is to be clear on financial goals before someone starts investing?

Dan Bortolotti: That's something we hear all the time and it seems very obvious. But if you talk to a lot of people, especially early on in the process, if you're working with a new client, you start to realize that many people's investing experience is pretty divorced from their goals. You talk about what are your financial goals? And they're things like, “Well, I want to get a 7% return.” Well, that's not really a goal. I mean, it's kind of a goal, but it's not a life goal. So, you have to push, why do you want to get a return like that?

I think it's really important to establish pretty early on in the relationship that your life goals are, what's more important, and your investments are just a tool, or a strategy for getting to those goals. So, when people, when they ask questions about why aren't we doing this or that? Turn around and say, “Well, how does that relate to your goal? How does that relate to your goal? What is your goal? Is it early retirement? Is it working later in life, but enjoying more spending?” It's really important to be able to define what the goal is, not in terms of a tactic, right? My goal is to invest 40% in US equities. That's not a goal. Try to attach you to something meaningful in your life, and then figure out your investment strategy is just a way of getting there.

It takes people a little while, I think, to get into that philosophy, but I've certainly found with clients, after a couple of years, they start to get that, and more and more of the discussions and the meetings tend to focus on those goals. They just kind of take for granted that the investment strategy is eventually going to get them there.

Cameron Passmore: Dan, I'd love to hear you talk about how important saving rate is relative to things like fees and performance, because I know you're very passionate about that, and you alluded to it earlier.

Dan Bortolotti: This is something that really came to the fore with me, because a lot of readers of the blog and a lot of people that followed my work early on, were people in the early years of their investment journey. Those people in their 20s just starting work. The enthusiastic DIY investors, for example, tend to skew on the younger side. They get very focused on fees, especially. It's funny, because I'm always really reluctant to downplay the importance of fees, because that was like the key message that I built my reputation on for years. Of course, fees are important. Of course, they erode your returns. But they have to be kept in perspective depending on the individual person.

So, I would be on the phone with investors or they would email me questions, and they would have $15,000 or $20,000 to invest, because they're just getting started in their journey and they're trying to decide why would you use this ETF at 10 basis points when you can get this one at 8? I'm thinking, you know what two basis points is on your portfolio, right? Two basis points is two bucks a year on $10,000. Okay, so it is absolutely trivial at that stage of your career, your investment journey.

So, focus on savings first. Focus on savings and appropriate asset mix for you. Goals like we talked about, what are you saving for? Are you saving for retirement or a down payment? Very different goals. All of those things are 100 times more important than a few basis points in fees, especially.

The commercial I always like, there's a an online brokerage, which I will not name where the guy is on his phone, and his brother comes in, and he says something like, “How's your DIY investing going?” He’s like, “Man, these low fees are really making a big difference.” It's like, over what time period and what amount of money you're talking about? If you just switched brokerages last month, trust me, the low fees aren't making any difference.

This is a discussion that has to be much more thoughtful. We work with clients. Our average account size in my book is somewhere around two and a half million. Now, fees make a huge difference. Because you may not even be saving anymore if you're late in your career, and your investment returns are driving everything. Of course, the fees are going to erode those. But let's try to understand, first of all, what is the number we were talking earlier about percentage drops in the market being less meaningful than dollars. Do the same thing with fees. If you find out that switching your portfolio is going to save you $9.12 next year in fees, it's not an important decision. If it's going to save you a few $1,000, of course it is.

That changes really over time. Just as a tangent to that, I would say, one of the things I have, we sort of created a monster when we brought up fee awareness with a lot of investors. Again, it's incredibly important and put it in context. When I was writing about this stuff 15 years ago, it was still very common for people to pay two and a half percent in mutual funds. I think that has become less and less common over time. The difference between paying two and a half percent and 20 basis points is life-changing. But what we have come to now is where people can understand why anybody would pay 20 basis points when they can pay 18. Then it starts to become a big distraction, I think.

Ben Felix: I have a question that’s sort of an extension to the discussion on fees. What do you see or how do you articulate the value of financial advice, if we consider investing to be effectively solved by low-cost ETFs mutual funds?

Dan Bortolotti: We've all kind of grown up in an environment where an advisor’s value has historically been tied to market beating returns. I mean, you would pay somebody because they could do better than a DIY investor could, just in terms of – when I say that, I say that they could do better than the indexes. That is no longer a compelling value proposition for any advisor, because most of them are not doing that. We get that question frequently. It's an absolutely fair question, right? Why would I pay you a fee when you've put all this information out there that I could just build my portfolio myself? I think the answer to that is, if you can do that, you should do that. I mean, we've provided you with all of these resources, and I desperately want people to succeed as DIY investors. But I've also come to understand that a lot of people don't have the time, the skill, or the inclination to do that.

So, for those people, we can provide a lot of value. It isn't in market beating returns. I've said to clients, many times, your expectation with us, if you invest with us, is you will get market returns minus what you pay us in fees. You are never going to beat the market and we are never going to tell you that that's how we add value. So, of course you add value with the financial plan. You add value with the implementation of the financial plan, which is hugely important, and a piece that gets missed a lot. You impose discipline. I mean, you're a buffer between the client and their emotions. They can call you and say, “I'm terrified. We should get out of the market now.” But they have to get through the guards before they do that. Most of the time, you can talk them in from the ledge.

The other thing I think a lot of enthusiastic DIY investors don't appreciate is they are an unusual bunch. I used to joke when I would do like a talk at an investing conference or something on like a Saturday afternoon. I said, “Take a look around. How many people do you think go to Investing conferences on a sunny Saturday afternoon? You guys are weird. You're an anomaly in society. So, don't think anybody can do this. Because most people do not have the inclination to do it and they take great comfort.”

I can't tell you how many times I've had clients, sort of older clients who just say I'm so happy that I have somebody that I trust, looking after the stuff, because I don't know what I would do if I had to worry about it myself. There's the value add. It's just a different model, though.

Cameron Passmore: Let's keep going down the DIY discussion. So, do you think the importance of financial planning, I suppose, like just investing is generally appreciated by the DIY community?

Dan Bortolotti: I would say, no. Mostly it's not. I feel that the DIY investing with DIY financial planning is not a great model for most people. I mean, I think we were saying investing has kind of been solved and the investing solutions are quite simple. I'm not sure I can say the same thing about financial planning. There's really not very much about it that's simple. I mean, once you get beyond spend less than you earn and save the difference, trying to make wise decisions about RSPs versus TFSAs versus mortgage payoff, and all of these other goals are not straightforward. There's no DIY financial planning software that solves that problem. It's more difficult.

I think the DIY investing plus fee-only financial planner is a model that, in theory, can work extremely well. We all know, in the industry, how many great fee-only planners there are out there. They don't do investments. They just do planning and they're really good at what they do. Problems are, it's not inexpensive, and a lot of people are reluctant to write a check to a financial planner, in a way that they're not as reluctant to have a fee taken from their portfolio, which they don't see.

The second part of it, even if they do willingly pay a reasonable fee for a financial plan, they still have to implement it. One of the things I've talked to fee-only planners about, is one of their great frustrations, I think, is like, “Man, I just did this really good plan for a couple and I'm pretty confident they're not going to follow it.” It's very frustrating, because it's not easy to do that and I really become a big fan of the model that we use here, which is financial planning and investment management by the same team. Because when we do a financial plan, the next step is we implement the financial plan, and there's a lot of value in closing that gap.

Ben Felix: Yes. I agree with you. Big time. It's not super common. But we've definitely had a few cases where we've sent someone off to a fee-only financial planner who, like you said, are incredible and do great work. Then, three years later, the person has come back and said, “I did get a great financial plan. But I haven't done anything. Can you help me now?” For some people, there's a gap there, not to say that nobody can implement.

Dan Bortolotti: No, for sure. I mean, it's the same as everything else. There are a lot of people who are very successful DIY investors. There are a lot of people who are extremely disciplined at following a financial plan. It's probably in the minority.

Ben Felix: Yes. It's the people listening to this podcast, maybe, and the people who go to your talk on Saturday.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. Let's just say that that's a subset of humanity.

Ben Felix: Yes. Definitely. I want to come back to something you touched on earlier, when you transition from being this blogger, writing to DIY investors, to being an advisor working with families, was there anything that surprised you about what clients actually found valuable?

Dan Bortolotti: Oh, there's so many things that surprised me. I think it's true. When I came into this business and when I started working as an advisor, I assumed that most people were primarily interested in the investment piece, because those were the ones that I was hearing from in response to the blog and everything that I've written about. So, I would have these clients come in, or prospective clients, and I figured all they wanted to talk about was like how to build a portfolio, and which ETFs to use and this and that. Then, you quickly realize that their eyes glaze over pretty quickly. There's still a few, like, I still have a small number of clients who are really into this and do enjoy that kind of conversation.

But the vast majority, people are not really interested in those details. They're interested in the fact that you know those details, and they're interested in the fact that they want to trust somebody to look after something that they're not prepared to do themselves. I don't think what I truly appreciated until after I made the transition, and I had been doing this for a number of years is the importance of trust. This affected a lot of the way that I would handle a meeting with prospective clients.

Again, early on, like I was all about, well, we can lower your costs by this and we can tax efficiencies, this that and the other thing, and this is the percentage of what asset class we can use. They're not interested in that. I don't think, most people” What they want to know is are you someone who I can trust with my life savings? Do I believe that you are acting in my best interest? Do I need to know all the details of what's under the hood of my portfolio? Probably not. But I want to know, what am I getting? What am I paying? And can I trust you?

That is really, I think, the most important thing. Once you win that trust, then you're likely to have a client for a very long time, and you're likely to have a client with an excellent investment experience. They're going to be happy, because they don't know – you know when you feel like – I'm not going to denigrate any specific industry, but just pick one where you go in and you feel like, “I cannot stand this retail experience. Because even though I need to buy this product, I don't like talking to the salespeople. I know they know more than I do, and they're just using it to manipulate me. I have to do it, because every two years, I got to buy one of these items and it's a miserable experience.”

You don't want that experience as an investor. You want the client to be able to call you and know that they're going to get a straight answer from you, and know that you're going to give them an answer that's in their best interest. They want to be able to do that multiple times. Every year, a couple of times, they're going to call you with these questions. That only comes after you've established the trust, and it doesn't happen right away. Even if they come on board as a client relatively quickly. It's not unusual for it to take a couple of years. I've certainly seen that evolution with clients over time. It's very rewarding. Three, four years into the relationship, they share something with you that they didn't share before, and you go, “Okay, now I get it. Now, you were going to feel me out for a little while and see, like, are you actually acting in my best interest? I don't know yet.” You need to demonstrate that enough times that eventually they will come around. And that's a really important step in that relationship.

Ben Felix: How did you change your interactions with clients to shift from, I can build your gray portfolio to, you can trust me?

Dan Bortolotti: Honestly, I don't think it was a conscious thing. I think it was just by following my instincts. I will say that one of the things that I think I have brought to this role that other people with a different path maybe didn't have was my first career was as a communicator, and I have a good understanding of what we do, but I don't have a brain like yours, Ben. And I don't have that kind of technical skill. So, it doesn't really come naturally, for me to get overly technical. I think that has worked in my favour. So, I would just talk to people in a natural way and I think that a lot of people who have had interactions with advisors have left the relationship because they felt kind of intimidated, or condescended to. I just tried not to be that guy. I just to try to listen to people, try to address their concerns in an honest and authentic way, and I guess it comes across. At least I hope it comes across.

Ben Felix: I mean, we know it does through your writing and speaking. That's very obvious that your communication skills are just on a different level than most people.

Dan Bortolotti: Thank you.

Cameron Passmore: And you're uniquely experienced to answer this next question, which is, how do you think people should make the decision between DIY or hiring an advisor?

Dan Bortolotti: That is really a great question and it's one I've spent, I think, a lot of my career trying to wrestle with. I would say, let's start with just a basic one, it’s the amount of money that you have to invest. I mean, the fact is, it's very difficult for investors with modest portfolios to find an advisor, who will charge them a low fee, and provide them with comprehensive service. They exist. I know your team, for example, doesn't have a minimum many more, which I think is amazing. We have had a minimum for a long time and we recognize that most people don't have our minimum.

So, there's a lot of people out there who we just unfortunately, cannot serve. And that is why I think we've devoted so much energy to helping DIY investors because we want to be able to do something for everyone. But if you're just getting started, and you've got, let's say under 100,000 to invest. It's pretty difficult to find someone who will take you on and do a great job. I hope that you can find it, but it's hard. Give it a shot. If you're so inclined, give it a shot as a DIY investor. Start small, start simple, see how much you enjoy it, see how you respond to market moves, do an experiment, and you know what, if it doesn't work out for you, what are the stakes? They are not that high, right? I mean, unless you, when I say start out and you started out by like speculating in small stocks, then the stakes are huge. But it's hard to go too far wrong with a traditional ETF portfolio that you manage on your own, especially, if you keep it simple.

As you build experience, you may very well feel like you're ready to take on DIY full-time. But I think the next step is what is the complexity of your portfolio. I mean, if I had a prospective client call me and say, “I have a decent-sized portfolio and it's all just in my RSP. I'm a single person. I just have an RSP. Nothing else.” I think I’d try to talk them out of working with us in a way that I would just say, like, honestly, I'm not sure I can add a whole lot of value for something that straightforward. Just keep doing what you're doing. If at some point in the future, you need something more, let us know.

If you are a couple and you've got seven different accounts, one's a corporation, you've got personal non-registered accounts. Good luck as a DIY. I mean, I will tell you, having worked with a lot of DIY investors over the years, that is what defeats them, and that is managing multiple accounts, and trying to rebalance across multiple accounts, trying to juggle different financial goals, retirement education, et cetera. That is asking a lot of a DIY investor, and that is somewhere where an advisor can definitely add value.

To build on that, I would say, if you have taxable investments, whether they're personal or corporate, the fee is tax deductible. So now, you have a great situation where A, we can do a lot more for you, if you have taxable investments. We can just add a lot more value. And after taxes, you're paying less. So, that's pretty good. I mean, we have large clients with big corporations, and let's say your fee is 60 basis points, but it's 30 after tax. It's like, you know how easy it is to add value for 30 basis points? Very, very easy. Less so on the smaller investor with a really simple situation.

Ben Felix: I think the other thing that often factors in there is that that person that you just described will typically be someone whose time is very valuable. It would take more of their time to do this thing and they're a person who has a larger opportunity cost of time.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes, absolutely. I think that part is left out by a lot of people who when they try to measure the value. What's the value of your time? People don't hire someone to cut the lawn because they're incapable of pushing a lawn mower, right? They hire somebody to cut the lawn because they would rather be spending their time doing something else. For a lot of people, like you said, especially like successful business people who have built wealth through corporations, they have more money than they have time, and they're willing to exchange one for the other, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Ben Felix: Yes, definitely. What do you think someone should look for in a financial advisor once they've made that decision?

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. Getting back to what we were talking about earlier, I think it's so important to find an advisor or an advisory team that looks after both the investment management and the financial planning in an integrated way. Because even though those two things are different, they are intimately intertwined. You can't really have one and ignore the other. One of the things I'm sure you guys have found too on prospective clients come and talk to you, we have so many people come to us who have had investment management, but they got zero financial planning from it. Their advisor, basically, he or she just managed the portfolio and picked stocks and nothing else. That's just half a job. With the model that is becoming increasingly common now in the wealth management field, as the fees are pretty similar to what the investing-only advisors used to provide, but you're providing a much bigger scope of service, and a much more useful integration of those two important factors.

So, I think that that, I guess, scope of service is the way I would answer the question. You're getting all of those things and they're done in an honorable way. I think transparency is another really important thing. I'm always blown away when talking to a prospective client, when you say you have any idea what the fees are, that you're paying out, they don't know. It's like how can you not know? The reason is, nobody has ever really disclosed it to them. You definitely have to know what you're paying and what you're getting. Then, how else do you assess whether you're getting good value? If you're talking to advisors, and they're really vague about fees, and I'm talking about management fees, and product fees both, turn around and walk away because you're not getting an honest answer.

Ben Felix: I had some crazy interactions like that on Twitter. Someone DMed me a while ago asking about – I don’t know what the question was about, but I asked them what their current fees were. It was a $2 million portfolio, I think. They said, “1% with investors group.” It's like are you sure? What fund are you in? So, it turns out they're in a fund with a 1% plus MER, and they're paying 1% for advice, but they didn’t know about the fund fee.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. It’s like 2%. Suddenly 1% becomes 2%. This is exactly the thing. I mean, I know we always try to do whenever we're talking to people. We say like, “Look, here's our fee, and average product costs is this.” You're always going to know that. It's right in there, written financial plan. So, you just have to know. I mean, again, we were talking about people's obsession with fees. Knowing what the fee is, is only part of the question. What are you getting for the fee is the other part. But you can't answer? Am I getting good value until you know what the fee is? So, there has to be full transparency on that. Shockingly, there isn't.

Cameron Passmore: Can you tell the story, Dan, of how you got connected with PWL?

Dan Bortolotti: That was funny how that worked out. I mean, getting back to when I was working with MoneySense magazine. This is now 2012. I was acting editor at the magazine for a year or so, and I assigned myself a story. What I’ve done, so on the blog, I of course, had a pretty big following of DIY investors and I got called out of the blue one day by Justin Bender, my current colleague here in the Toronto office. He was just starting out at the time there. He said, “Look, I have an idea for you.” He said, “We want to do a little campaign for charity. What we want to do is, we want to work with three, do-it-yourself investors, who come to us with some kind of – their portfolio is a bit of a disaster. They need a bit of a plan. They pay us a flat fee, which we give to charity, and let's see how this goes.”

Justin said to me, “Do you mind putting something on the blog about this? We'll see if it generates any interest.” Well, not surprisingly, generated a ton of interest. So, they worked with, I think it was three or four clients for charity. It was very successful. People were thrilled with the results. I came to him and said, “If you have all these happy clients, you would make a great story for MoneySense magazine, and I called it renovate your portfolio.” What we did was, I profiled these three clients who had worked with him. They came in, “This is what our portfolio look like. We had no plan. And Justin worked with me here. And this is how we built a new plan.”

Anyway, the piece was very successful, and of course, everybody started calling him, and is calling Shannon Bender, they weren't married at the time. But, who are now together, and people were calling the Toronto office and say, “Hey, I read this article on MoneySense. Can you do this for me?” He said, “Well, it was kind of a one-off thing. This is not really what we do.”

Anyway, one day, I mean, I started to hang out with them, because we got along really well personally, and we’re very like-minded. He said to me, “Have you ever thought about coming on board and doing this as an advisor?” I literally, had never crossed my mind. He said, “You know what we could do is we could offer this kind of service, where we help do-it-yourself investors build a portfolio and get a financial plan.” He said, “You could do that. We'll get the proper licencing and follow all the regulatory rules to get you up to speed.” But you have a following people will come to you and they would work with me at the beginning. But of course, I wasn't a licenced advisor. So, I'd have to turn it over to them to build a portfolio.

Anyway, long story short. We did a number of these. The service was so popular, we had a waiting list a mile long. We couldn't work with everybody we wanted to. Eventually, they said, “Why don't you think about coming on board, getting licenced and just doing this full-time?” That was 2013. Here I am, 11 years later, I left that world behind and never really saw it coming. But I just so enjoyed actually working with people, instead of just writing about it, that it really was a natural move.

Ben Felix: What happened with the DIY service?

Dan Bortolotti: It got to the point where it was just too difficult for us to manage it. It evolved over time. When we first brought people on doing it, there was no maximum amounts. We worked with some pretty large portfolios. Then we decided no, we were only going to offer this service to people with portfolios that were more modestly sized. Again, getting back to trying to fill that gap for people who normally wouldn't be able to come on board with us as full clients, fully managed clients. Even that became too much, and honestly, the business just started to grow so quickly. We were bringing on new clients all the time and we just couldn't do it anymore. We kind of sunsetted that. It probably it was around 2016, I think, was the last time we did it.

Ben Felix: Super interesting. You guys together such an incredible part of PWL story. I think I joined a little bit before you did. But then, you and Justin together, just created this rocket ship in Toronto that I think really brought PWL to another level.

Dan Bortolotti: I think we have such complementary skills, Justin and I. I mean, he is so good at the portfolio management and the understanding a whole the technicalities. I mean, I think you and Ben kind of kindred spirits in that ways and that your brains work the same way. You're really good on that stuff. I'm not. But I enjoy the communication and getting out the message. I used to say to Justin, “You do so much great work, but not enough people know about it. We got to get it out there.” So, we started to collaborate on a lot of things too, where he would do the research, and he would have the ideas, and then I would help them write it up.

Hopefully, I would bring some input into it as well. But we collaborated very well. And still, to this day, I think, we think in different ways. But when you put our heads together, we usually come up with some pretty good and innovative solutions. I would say, that was one of the interesting things about all of that when he and I got together and we started doing all of these resources for DIY investors on the blogs, and white papers, and it was all free. There were mutterings and people would say to us, like, “Why are you giving away all this information for free? You're just cannibalizing your own business.” We said, “No, I don't think so. Because if we go out there, and we demonstrate our expertise, we're going to attract clients.” There will be some people who will mop up all of our content and go off and do it themselves, but they would have done it themselves, anyway.

There's a lot of people who would have said, “You know what, I was thinking about doing it myself. But this sounds maybe a little bit more complicated than I thought. These guys seem to have our best interests at heart and they know what they're talking about. I'm going to give them a call.” I'm not sure that that was all that common of a marketing strategy at the time. Remember, this is pre-social media, which didn't really kick off until I don't know, 2015, 2016. So, this was earlier than that. I think it was counterintuitive, but it worked really well.

Ben Felix: It shaped the firm. It changed our whole firm's approach and that's become who we are as a firm now, and you guys really played a huge role in creating that.

Dan Bortolotti: I think the way you've taken up that torch is really impressive, because I remember having this discussion with people early on. Honestly, we had talked to other advisors who are saying things like that at other firms. It was like, “Oh, I should do that.” Okay. You should do that, but you can't wave a magic wand and create great content. We put in a ton of time. But we also brought, I think, some skill and talent to it. And as you guys have found out, I mean, you generate an insane amount of content, but it is a full-time job, and it takes a really dedicated smart person to crank out that much excellent content. There's a lot of people out there creating content that is very low quality, or they start a house on fire, and they do it for six months, and then they just fade away because they run out of energy or ideas. So, that's why I think, the fact that you have been able to do it for as long as you have is really impressive. All of us at this company, I think, have fed off of each other's energy and talents, and it's been a very, very productive and creative place to work.

Ben Felix: Yes. To your point earlier about Justin and I being kindred spirits, he was on vacation a few weeks ago, as you know, and he spent a lot of that vacation, emailing back and forth with me, modelling the budget, the proposed budget changes to capital gains. I thought that was pretty funny. His vacation was spent in Excel, modelling.

Dan Bortolotti: Yes. That's pretty standard, I think, for him. It shows you the kind of dedication and just the focus. I think that's what it is. Once he gets into something like that, he's not going to stop until it's done properly. I tell you, it's a nice environment to work in with people like that.

Ben Felix: Yes, definitely.

Cameron Passmore: As a cap to this conversation, Dan, how do you define success in your life?

Dan Bortolotti: It's something I've thought about a lot. I would say the answer to that question is evolved over time too. I think it would have been kind of achievement-focused if you'd asked me years ago. I don't necessarily try to focus on specific achievements anymore as a way of defining success. I think it's about authenticity and it's about showing up every day and doing the best you can. If you get great results, and if you accomplish amazing things, good for you. But even if you don't, I think it's the effort and the honest approach that you bring to everything you do. To me, if that's your mantra in life, that's what success looks like.

Cameron Passmore: Love it. Great answer. Great to have you join us and been great to work beside you for so many years. Thanks, Dan.

Dan Bortolotti: Thank you guys.

Ben Felix: Thanks, Dan.

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