January 23, 2025

Episode 341 - PWL’s Next Chapter

January 23, 2025

PWL Capital is undergoing an exciting change that will help the company bring a greater positive impact to the Canadian Wealth Management space and serve more clients effectively. In this episode, Ben Felix and Cameron Passmore welcome Mike Sullivan, co-founder of OneDigital, to share the inside story behind PWL Capital's recent decision to join forces with OneDigital. With nearly 25 years of experience in growth through acquisitions, Mike explains how their unique culture and strategic vision led to this exciting collaboration. We discuss Mike’s role in driving OneDigital's expansion and how the company’s values align with PWL's mission to offer low-cost, client-centric, systematic investing. He provides insights into why this partnership represents more than just a business transaction by amplifying a shared vision for Canadian investors. Our conversation also delves into the dynamics of mergers and acquisitions and examines the importance of culture and purpose in making these critical decisions. Today’s episode offers a rare inside look at an M&A transaction with key players that many listeners will already be well-acquainted with. Tune in now to hear it all!

Key Points From This Episode:

(0:00:16) Details on PWL Capital's decision to partner with OneDigital.

(0:14:31) An introduction to co-founder Mike Sullivan and OneDigital.

(0:16:38) How Mike knows when an acquisition will be a good fit.

(0:19:13) The opportunities for building a different kind of wealth management firm in Canada.

(0:21:14) What attracted Mike to PWL as a potential OneDigital partner.

(0:34:05) Mike’s insights on applying what’s worked to the Canadian marketplace.

(0:36:14) How being part of OneDigital will make PWL better.

(0:37:59) Mike and his co-founder Adam Bruckman’s objectives for OneDigital.

(0:40:20) Why you shouldn’t expect changes to PWL’s service offerings or teams.

(0:45:02) How being part of OneDigital will help PWL assist other like-minded advisors.

(0:46:36) The typical advisor profile that PWL/OneDigital Canada would like to attract.

(0:53:15) Reflections on our hopes and goals: what we are looking forward to at PWL.

(0:57:45) Mike’s definition of success, plus Cam and Ben’s answer to the success question!

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're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, Chief Investment Officer at PWL capital, and Cameron Passmore, Portfolio Manager at PWL Capital.

Cameron Passmore: Welcome to episode 341. And yes, I'm back for this episode. Great to be back. But boy, am I a rusty, Ben? But back to share some news.

Ben Felix: You don't sound rusty. You sound smooth as ever.

Cameron Passmore: Smooth as ever.

Ben Felix: Yeah, so this is going to be quite a different episode. Well, a very different episode for anything that we've ever done. Hopefully, listeners do find it interesting and get some value out of it. But it is a very different kind of episode that we've never been able to do before, and you'll understand why in a minute. We do have some exciting news to share. And when you hear this news, it's also going to explain where Cameron's been lately. Cameron, do you want to go ahead?

Cameron Passmore: Sure. Yeah, the news is after nearly 30 years of being employee-owned, PWL Capital has joined a firm called OneDigital. And just to put a fine point on that, yes, OneDigital has PWL Capital. And I, and I think you, Ben, could not be more excited. And that's what the point of today's conversation is about.

I'm guessing most people haven't heard of OneDigital. I had not heard of OneDigital either when Mike Sullivan, who's our guest today, when Mike reached out to me during the summer of 2023. Closing in on 19 months ago, we had our first just initial conversation. And since then, we've done lots of conversations, travel, soul searching, dreaming, and we made the decision to join OneDigital.

Ben Felix: Yep. How would you explain why we decided to do this?

Cameron Passmore: We found ourselves in an interesting spot in the Canadian marketplace. And the Canadian marketplace on its own is quite investing. We're well known to have some of the highest fees in the world, like MERs. We're also known to have some of the lowest adoption rate of systematic investing, indexing, whatever you want to call it, markets work type philosophy. And that's been the sandbox we've been playing in. And I think we've had some success with this podcast, with the work that we've done with clients, with your YouTube channel, in getting the message out about what we believe in and what many people believe in in Canada.

And in Canada, there is no scale national firm of size that does this. There are a lot of great advisors that believe in this. There's a lot of great advisors doing great work, but there is no large enterprise that has this as their core belief. You and I have talked about this so many times, Ben, where we just dreamed about what could we be? And what else is interesting too is the Canadian marketplace is interesting, but PWL is a firm is interesting. And we've grown so much over the past five, six, seven years. Our team is now approaching 100 people. The assets we manage are approaching $4 billion. All of a sudden, you imagine, you dream about what is possible.

Our advisor group is extremely young and extremely talented. The average advisor here is 20 years younger than I am. The average client is quite a bit younger than average. We have a relatively low base of retirees that makes our client set, our business quite unique in the marketplace. And you say, "Huh, what can we do with this team in this country with this kind of exposure and awareness that we've had?" A great part due to the phenomenal work that you've done on the podcast and your YouTube channel.

And then we started getting from the marketplace, some firms reaching out to us to acquire us. And those conversations always felt like they were spreadsheet MBA driven. And I had many of those conversations as have others in the firm about us being taken over. It just never felt right. It felt more like a transaction as opposed to the fulfillment of a dream. But this conversation I had with Mike, June of '23, it was different. It was, "What do you guys want to do? And who are you? And who are you? And where are you going? And what's your purpose? And what's your mission? And tell me about your people."

It was interesting. We didn't need them to be successful. They didn't need us to be successful. It's interesting. But we'll stay in touch and carried on. There's no aggressive follow-up or nothing like that. And then we just kept on slowly talking over the subsequent 18 months. And of course, you were a big part of that. And yeah, here we are.

Ben Felix: You mentioned it, but there was a period of time where I don't have an explanation for how the timing worked the way that it did, but we were approached completely unsolicited by multiple firms. And we can't talk about who they were, but all very, very exciting firms to hear from that were like, "Hey, we're interested in you guys."

Cameron Passmore: 100%.

Ben Felix: And so like, "Wow, that's incredible." And it was all clustered around the same period of time. We kept looking at each other, like, "Another one? What is happening?" Each story was unique about why they had decided to reach out. So it wasn't like there was some database that included us all of a sudden. It was all these unique stories about how they heard about us and why they decided to reach out.

And we did have a lot of conversations and initially came away saying, "You know what? We're good. We're going to keep going." But yeah, I mean, it was Mike who listeners are going to hear from in a couple of minutes. Talking to him and continuing to talk to him just became increasingly obvious to us and other people in our firm that this was something potentially pretty special and very different from all of the other conversations that we had had.

Cameron Passmore: I got to be clear. All the firms we spoke to were wonderful.

Ben Felix: 100%.

Cameron Passmore: There's just a cultural difference the more we talk to more people and always carrying a large dose of skepticism just to be careful not to get blinded. And when you get great culture together with the experience that they have for where we are and what we think we can do in Canada, it to us became pretty obvious that this is a great opportunity that needs to be explored further. We spent a ton of time doing that exploration to understand more about them, more about how we would operate in this world. And tick box after tick box just went by, it's like, "Man, it's incredible." And it continued to be incredible through the entire process.

Ben Felix: Every opportunity that they had, that Mike and the rest of his team at OneDigital had to either impress us or not. Every time there's a crossroads or whatever, it was like, "This is a pivotal conversation." Every time we came away being like, "Wow." Just incredibly impressed, incredibly aligned. We went into this, as we started to get more serious about it, looking at how doing something like this would affect our clients first and foremost. How it would affect our people, our team, our employees? And really, how it would enable the vision that we have for Canada? And like you said, Cameron, OneDigital checked all those boxes and then some.

Cameron Passmore: And even though it's a 5,000-person firm, it still feels entrepreneurial. It's still led by the co-founders. We communicate with the co-founders often. And this is a 5,000-person firm, but often during every day about solving styles. We were not handed a recipe book as to this is how thou shalt operate. It's like, "How do you guys think we should do this? What are the opportunities? How would you solve stuff?" And it's been, frankly, a wonderful experience.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I do want to say that once we decided on this path, so we had initially said we're going to keep going this on our own. But then once we decided to take OneDigital seriously, and that is an option seriously, we did engage in a formal process to assess the firms that had initially reached out to us through that formal process. We also initiated conversations with a few other firms that could have been a fit. We took the whole thing very, very seriously. There was a lot of due diligence both ways, a lot of firms that were ultimately interested in us. But we didn't mess around. We took this seriously.

We had external advice from people with expertise in assessing deals like this. It wasn't like we just like these guys. We did like them and that caused us to look at this option seriously. Once we got to that point though, we initiated this formal process and OneDigital came out on every possible metric ahead of the pack, and that's how we're here.

Cameron Passmore: And we would categorically never do anything that would adversely affect our service.

Ben Felix: Correct.

Cameron Passmore: This is a story about amplifying what you and I worked on here for the past seven, eight years. It's about amplifying the message, amplifying the team, helping more people, attracting more team members, attracting other potential advisory firms to join. That's what this is about. It's about helping more people in the way that we have done. This is not about synergies or cost-cutting. That is not at all on the table.

Ben Felix: Well, that's what OneDigital saw in us. They see one team with one consistent message delivering comprehensive advice and planning as a team. And that's something that's pretty unique, especially in Canada, especially with the systematic low-cost, whatever you want to call it, investment philosophy that we have. That doesn't exist outside of us. There are individual teams that invest that way, whatever. But as one firm with one message rallied around the same thing, that's what we represent. And that's why we are interesting to them. And none of that's going to change. If anything, it'll be amplified, it'll be augmented in different ways.

And I think it'll also put us in a position to – we talked about this with Mike, to become the mothership for advisors in Canada who are aligned with us, who think this way about planning and about portfolio management. We're now in a position that we were not in before to be the landing place for people like that at any level of existing assets that they may be managing, which previously would have been a challenge for us to do. Yeah.

I mean, on that note, any Canadian advisors who are aligned with us, who do think that way, who are listening to this podcast, now is a great time to get in touch because we're much more well-equipped to facilitate and execute on those types of conversations than we were, well, three weeks ago or whatever.

Cameron Passmore: Not just Canadian, but also American advisors.

Ben Felix: Yeah, that's a really good point.

Cameron Passmore: We have a large RIA in the US as well. So it's going to be great for listeners too, that we can now find great people in the US to help. Some of them might want some help.

Ben Felix: Yeah. I just want to say, because I know there are clients listening to this podcast, there are people who may consider reaching out to us as a client. This deal with OneDigital, this partnership with OneDigital, it will not affect our investment philosophy. That is one of the things that they were attracted to. It's not something that they're going to change. They're not going to jam high-fee products and say, "You have to start selling these." It's the opposite. Our server's offering won't change. And again, it will likely only get better.

One of the things that we've talked about with OneDigital is adding complimentary services to increase what we're able to do for clients in-house, things like insurance, potentially tax. We've looked at different options there, which I think would be incredible. We talked about that with Mike as just some dreaming, as we called it.

If anything, I think what we've done here strengthens our conviction, because a firm as large as OneDigital, as prominent as OneDigital in the spaces that they operate in has come and said, "We want more of what you guys do at our firm." And that's why we've done this. And it also gives us more resources to execute on our vision and on what we've already been doing.

I do also want to of mention that Cameron's not going to become back in the podcast as a full-time co-host like he was back in the day.

Cameron Passmore: You guys are so good. I feel so good about that.

Ben Felix: Well, people miss you too.

Cameron Passmore: I get that. There's some nostalgia and I loved every minute of it. You have to acknowledge that the three of you guys are really good.

Ben Felix: Doing this podcast with you for however long we did it, six years, I guess, seven years. I don't know how long it was.

Cameron Passmore: Seven years in August.

Ben Felix: Yeah. Total blast. Bringing Mark in was awesome. But I agree with you, the dynamic with Mark, Dan, and I is very cool. Dan's something else.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah.

Ben Felix: That's almost like he, to an extent, replaces your sort of wisdom, and common sense, and calm demeanor. It doesn't replace you, but it brings the similar kind of elements. Now, that being said, Cameron will be coming back in the podcast with a segment to talk about what he's working on, what he's learning in his role as PWL's CEO as we embark on this next chapter for the firm.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, it'll be a total blast. I guess I'll be at the back end, in the after show or something, but that's all to be determined.

Ben Felix: Hey, we'll figure that out, but you'll be back.

Cameron Passmore: I'll be back. I'm not going anywhere. Cool. Well, to help tell this story, we thought it'd be great to invite Mike Sullivan, who is the co-founder of OneDigital, who, along with Adam Bruckman, founded the firm almost 25 years ago. The first 10, 11 years or so, they built out an employee benefits and insurance business. And over the past 14 years, they've been growing through acquisition. And it's an amazing growth story. We wanted Mike to join us to give the background and the reasons that they reached out to us and how this all came together.

Mike's responsible for the strategic growth initiatives, acquisitions, partnerships. And he focuses on expanding the business in all kinds of different lines of business. Mike joined us from his place in the DC suburbs of Virginia where he lives with his wife, Patty. They have three kids.

Ben Felix: Like I said at the beginning, it's a different episode. It's always funny to see the feedback we got on different types of episodes. We'll try a different format. We'll try a different type of guests. And sometimes we're surprised by the feedback. I have no idea what people are going to think about this episode. But it is a rare instance to kind of look inside of an M&A transaction that has happened involving people that you as listeners know being Cameron and I. Hopefully, it's interesting.

I mean, this is a podcast about financial decision-making, which this was for us, obviously. Maybe not applicable to all the listeners. But either way, I hope it's got some interesting nuggets for the listeners.

Cameron Passmore: Love it. Great setup. Okay. Good to go to our conversation with Mike Sullivan?

Ben Felix: Let's go.

***

Cameron Passmore: Mike Sullivan, it's great to welcome you to the Rational Reminder podcast.

Mike Sullivan: Thank you very much, Cam. It's a pleasure to be here.

Cameron Passmore: Great to see you after all these months of conversation. Off the top, Mike, how would you describe OneDigital to our listeners?

Mike Sullivan: OneDigital is a US-based insurance, financial services and human resource consulting firm that works with both individuals and families and employers all over the country, and now starting in Canada as well.

Ben Felix: Yep. Love that. How big is OneDigital?

Mike Sullivan: OneDigital today is about 5,000 employees in the states. And very excited to say, about a little over a hundred employees now in Canada. Pretty good-sized company, I think.

Cameron Passmore: Mike, you're a co-founder, founding it just under 25 years ago. But 14, 15 years ago, you started down the path of acquiring other companies. How many acquisitions have you done over the years?

Mike Sullivan: Over that, I think, ballpark about 15 years, we've done probably a little over 200 acquisitions. And they come in all shapes and sizes. But specifically, when I was talking to you and Ben about this, it really comes down to we've done to date about five, what we call platform-level acquisitions, which are really – we describe it as the core of a team that we're going to build a business around. When we think about Canada, we think about PWL being the platform that we're going to build our entire operation around.

Cameron Passmore: And how many have you done outside of the US?

Mike Sullivan: This is our first acquisition outside of the United States. Very excited to make that happen and make it happen with your team.

Cameron Passmore: Amazing.

Mike Sullivan: It's very cool.

Ben Felix: It is very cool. You've done a lot of acquisitions, fewer on the platform side, but a lot of acquisitions overall How do you decide whether a firm that you're considering acquiring is a good fit?

Mike Sullivan: I would say that I've described in the past that we've been on this road less traveled. And by that, I mean, for us, we tend to focus almost first, second, and third on the cultural fit of that organization. We spend a lot of time around the country and now in Canada meeting people, getting to understand if we fit each other from a people standpoint, and assuming we see the world through a similar lens, have a similar client focus, whether it be at the individual family or at the employer level.

And what we have found is that if you get the cultural fit right, there's very little that you won't figure out together. If you don't get that right, there's almost nothing that you'll figure out together. We focus on culture and then let the math of an opportunity present itself post that. It's a little bit different, I think, than most organizations out there, but it's served us really well in terms of identifying teams that fit us and where we think will be a great partner.

Cameron Passmore: Your roots are in the insurance, employee benefits. How did you now end up deciding to get into wealth management?

Mike Sullivan: It's interesting. Had you told me five years ago, would we be building the way we're building today in financial planning and wealth management? I'm not sure I would have gotten to this intersection. But really what we found was we spent 20 years as an employee-benefit advisor, and our first big rotation was into the retirement space. And in the retirement space in the US, it's all about serving the planned participant. And what we found was whether it be at the C-suite level or throughout an entire organization, people were in desperate need of financial planning. We began to build that way.

And then the other interesting thing is in our core employee benefits business. All of our survey work was coming back, basically saying financial stress is the number one stressor of all employees in all different segments of our US economy. And I think we're going to find it's across the world. We basically said, "If we're going to serve people the right way and if we're going to do what we need to do for employers, we have to start thinking more broadly down to the individual and family level." And it began this journey of building a different kind of wealth management firm. And I'm really excited. It's the fastest growing part of our business and it really led us to this opportunity to connect with you guys.

Ben Felix: You mentioned building a different kind of wealth management firm. Can you talk about your vision for wealth management?

Mike Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, the beauty of starting this process more recently versus I think decades of maybe legacy ways of thinking about markets and structures and that kind of thing, we're basically like, "If we could take a client-centered approach to financial planning and wealth management, do it as a fiduciary and take a much more systematic investment approach to model portfolios and driving low-cost investment options more broadly into the marketplace, we think that's the pathway many, many firms are looking at now. But the interesting thing is that the more I started to talk with you folks and the more we started to understand the Canadian market, it really presented itself as an even more opportunistic situation in Canada because the way the Canadian market is built.

Cameron Passmore: Let's double down on that. Can you talk about the opportunity you see for all of us in wealth management in Canada?

Mike Sullivan: Look, a lot of this I've learned from you and Ben, and I've learned from a lot of diligence that we've just gone through taking this big step to move outside the US. But when you take a step back and you look at what the data says, the data will tell you that the Canadian market is the most expensive market in the world for consumers to get advice. And probably you can argue the least efficient way in which it happens today.

When you're presented in a discussion like we've been having over the past fifteen to eighteen months getting to know each other and you basically say, "Could we start with the right team doing business the right way, presenting a totally different value proposition in the marketplace?" When a market is built the way the Canadian market is, as I described, it just to us sounded like a great business opportunity to be a partner with someone and build together.

Ben Felix: What about PWL specifically made you want us to be part of OneDigital?

(24:00 ish) Mike Sullivan: I still kind of think about from the early conversations on Zoom with Cam, better understanding what PWL is all about, to meeting you, Ben, and Brenda, and Tessa, and really throughout the entire organization, we're almost mirrors of each other from a cultural standpoint. What's important to us is important to you. The way we want to build and create opportunity for our own employees. The way we want to take care of clients. All of that.

And I think you'd agree, it's almost remarkably similar in terms of how we're building and how we think about nurturing a great culture. When we felt so strongly aligned with your team as people and then we started applying our philosophies on planning and investment and being a fiduciary, it simply to us felt like a match made in heaven.(25:09) Really, really excited about that. But with who you are as people, really fit us as people as well. And that's a great place to start.

Cameron Passmore: Do you remember, Mike, when you realized that this was going to be a good fit?

Mike Sullivan: I think you and I probably have spent 50 hours in conversation about, "Does this make sense?" We love finding firms that don't need us to be successful. The question is, could we play the second half of the ball game together in a way that creates something special in Canada? And I think when I went from spending a lot of time talking to you, then began to talk to Ben, I can't tell you the number of podcasts I watched, you get a feel for an organization.

And then all of a sudden, something clicks. It's a humbling thing to be able to align with an organization like yours. And when you realize that and you kind of let that wash over you, you fundamentally understand that you're going to help make us a better company. I'm not exactly sure when that clicked, but it was pretty early in our conversations where I knew it would be a pretty humbling thing and a pretty cool thing for us to be able to pull this together as partners.

Ben Felix: You mentioned it, but I've got to ask since we're here. On this podcast, what role, if any, did this podcast play in your interest in PWL?

Mike Sullivan: Well, I'd say it this way, Ben, it was an intriguing piece of the puzzle. We meet all kinds of talented folks that know how to be good planners. But to find a team that has been able to amplify your voice in the marketplace the way you have through the podcast or the YouTube channel, we, all of a sudden, basically said, "Not only is this an opportunity to align with an incredibly talented team that fits us culturally, but we can really learn from you about how to build this kind of presence more broadly in the US and really approach it as an investor in how might we continue to amplify your and other voices across the country. I think we would have been very fortunate to align with their team, whether it was there or not. But it's a really interesting way in which I think we're going to continue to grow and amplify what it is we believe in so fundamentally. It's a really cool piece of the puzzle.

Cameron Passmore: Our first call, Mike, was June of 2023, over 18 months ago. What initially caused you to reach out?

Mike Sullivan: I had spent a fair amount of time getting to know the folks at Dimensional. I can't remember exactly, but somehow Canada came up when I was in a discussion with folks at Dimensional and it led to me meeting Brad in Canada. And then when I said, "If we're seriously thinking about this first expansion." And it was all tied to if we're going to move outside the US, the most logical thing when you're in our shoes is make it close to home, make it easier than it might be looking to go farther around the globe. Brad said, "Well, look, if you want to start at the top of the talent pool, you should go have a conversation with Cam at PWL and really understand what their view is of the world." And so it led to me calling you and us becoming BFFs.

Ben Felix: I feel like, Cameron, you got to tell your story about that first call with Mike.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, sure. It's interesting because listeners know that I love talking shop with people and I'll talk to pretty much anybody. And I talk to multiple people every week from all over the world about the business, either joining the business or other opportunities that are out there. I gladly took the call with you, Mike, and I never heard of OneDigital as I suspect most listeners have not heard of OneDigital.

But I think back to that call, I mean, first of, we got along. It was clearly about people coming together to create something special, it doesn't exist. And I know it sounds like perhaps a cliche line, but it is true. It wasn't a business deal. I've had numerous other firms reach out to make an offer and insinuate that, because we're not interested, we're crazy to not take this offer because it's about lining our bank accounts.

And our conversation was not that. It's like, "Who are we? And who are you? And what are we all trying to accomplish? And can we do things better together?" And this is something. Ben, you and I have talked about this a lot. Because we're onto something in terms of the belief system, the type of people we attract, the service we're delivering, the messaging is getting out there and it's working. And like you said, on the top, Mike, we're over 100 people.

We are a successful, small, large firm. And we're doing great. And you're right, we did not need you. You do not need us to be successful. But you start to look around and say, "What could we become?" And our team is incredibly talented. On average, incredibly young. The average advisor in our team is more than 20 years younger than I am. And our average client is quite young also. We're in a rather unique situation. You look at that and say, "What could we become?"

Long before you and I spoke, Mike, Ben and I have talked about this and others in the firm have rift on this is what is possible. They started to say, "Well, how do you do this?" And we didn't have the expertise of how to scale this without losing that client touch, without losing that closeness, that intimacy with clients, which we will not lose going through this. This is about amplifying what we all believe in. It's about magnifying our messages. It's about helping people, for example, on the other side of the border that happened to listen to either the podcast or Ben's YouTube channel, etc.

It just seemed like a possibility that would just be worthwhile continuing discussions. But, I mean, we talked back and forth and said, "Well, we're fine without you. We just kind of carried on and then we reconnected." It was a really slow, methodical, thoughtful, skeptical. We forced skepticism into our thinking process around this. We think we've done a pretty good job around this, but that's my recollection. Ben, you and I talked a lot through that. What do you think about all this at that time?

Ben Felix: Yeah, I mean, you mentioned our skepticism and we were, no offense, Mike, super skeptical of all those conversations that we had as people started reaching out to us. But every time we talked to you, Mike, and other people on the OneDigital team, that skepticism decreased and decreased until we got to a point where it was like, "This is really what they say it is. And this fit really is as good as it seems."

But yeah, I mean, like you said, Cameron, we started out saying it's kind of cool that we can have these conversations with firms like OneDigital and others that had reached out to us, but we're fine on our own. And while that was true, and I think you say, Mike, that you guys like to acquire firms that don't need to be acquired or don't want to sell. So that is true. We would have been fine, but it became increasingly obvious that going down this path would make us better than we could be on our own.

Mike Sullivan: Yeah. Look, I talk all the time, Cam, about the fact that Adam and I started the company 25 years ago. We've been at this for a quarter-century. And at some point when you're a private equity-backed firm, you go from the concept of, "Look, we want to grow organically. We want to grow acquisitively," but you feel like acquisitions are part of what is required when you are PE backed.

And again, after literally decades of doing this, all of a sudden, you're sort of like, "If an opportunity doesn't make us better, it's not about getting bigger." So much of what goes on in the marketplace, people talk about size and somehow equate size to how effective that firm is. And there's an implied correlation between the two. I'd argue the vast majority of PE firms are actually less capable once hundreds of acquisitions are done.

I never forgot the day. I think, Cam, you and I have been talking for probably eight, 10 months and you basically said, "We can't do this. I just can't get there intellectually, emotionally. It's just not the right time." And I was so bummed. And I remember I think it was probably a month later, I texted you and said, "I'm not going away." And you just kind of sent back a smiley face and we started talking again. And I think we just finally came to the realization that, one, we can do something really cool together. Two, I think we bring interesting capabilities, and talents, and experiences to the table. And I think we just came to the realization we can be better together and serve more clients more effectively together. And when you find that, you just figure it out.

Cameron Passmore: Yeah, and acquisitions sound so business school MBA kind of speak. And it's more about bringing people that are aligned together to create something great that I would argue Canada desperately can benefit from. There's so much demand for what we represent. And I say we is the planning community in Canada, not just the people here. And there's an obvious opportunity to bring people like all of us in this community together in one super-structure to be better at what we all do and to help more people.

To help more people, it requires a certain amount of platform, and scale, and abilities, and expertise, and balance sheet. That's the reality. And this is a model that we've witnessed from here in Canada in the US, where you get these scaled, amazing advice client-centric firms that have built and scaled and deliver incredible services. That's what we want to do.

Ben Felix: Yep. I remember that text, Mike, when you told Cameron that you weren't going to go away, and we started talking to you again. And at that time, we had made up our minds that we were going to keep going on our own. But then when those conversations started up again, it just became increasingly obvious how you guys were thinking about how we fit into what you want to build and how you can augment what we're doing. And so then we're like, "Okay, let's take this seriously and look at it." And then as we spent more time with the people, that cultural fit that you talked about earlier, it just became so obvious. Every conversation, every interaction that we had, we came away from it being like, "Yep, that was another great person."

Mike Sullivan: But I'll tell you, the other thing that's really cool, there's attributes that you look for when you're talking to teams on the other side. And I remember I had been oriented towards Cam. I met Cam first. Cam was the largest shareholder inside PWL. And we got to a point where it's like, "We really need to dig in and think more about this strategically." I'll never forget, Cam said like, "Okay, I'm ready to reengage. You got to talk to Ben because Ben's not there. Now, spend time with Ben."

And the level of respect that was shown and the level of, "If it doesn't work for Ben, it's not gonna work for me. And if it doesn't work for Ben, Ben's a proxy for a whole host of other people inside the firm. Pivot over there and spend time with Ben." And you and I started going through this conversation. It's just the right way to figure out whether or not you're meant to come together. And it's all about strategy and common vision and building for the long term. There's nothing synthetic about this. It's all about build for the long term.

Cameron Passmore: As you often say, not leading with a spreadsheet, which I can tell you from other conversations over the years, they're often spreadsheet driven.

Mike Sullivan: Look, we were at a conference recently where the exact quote was put culture at the bottom of your list and then get around to that at the end. And yet most advisors I think would suggest it's the number one issue they're trying to understand. The problem is culture doesn't fit into a spreadsheet. Long-term equity growth doesn't really fit into a spreadsheet the right way. There's a lot of other things that allow you to line up the math that that kind of becomes the litmus of where people, position, entities like ours. Anytime I think you lead with that, I don't think you end up building great companies. I think you end up building bigger companies. But I don't think you build a great company that way. I think we're going to build a great company together.

Cameron Passmore: Now that you're here in Canada, how do you think about applying what's worked to date in the Canadian marketplace?

Mike Sullivan: I think I've kidded with you that, over the past 25 years, we probably made every mistake we could make. We're going to come to Canada and say, "Let's not make those same mistakes in doing certain things." It took us time to realize that culture is the number one, number two, and number three thing.

And so you guys, you're basically a proxy for OneDigital in the marketplace, and you're going to lead in terms of where we go have additional conversations. But I do believe that some of the core strengths of OneDigital, we have a deep understanding of scaling businesses and building operational prowess or building operational processes for scaling. I think we're going to lead from a technology development and AI standpoint.

I think we've spent a huge amount of time and have a significant group of people in what we call people and culture that fits so well with Tessa and your organization in terms of how we think about aligning with the people that take care of our clients every single day. There are decades of learning on how you go from – think about if we're going to go from a hundred team members in Canada to a thousand team numbers in Canada, what does that look like? And how do you do that so that everybody loves walking in the side door every day and clients feel that passion? There's a nuance and a finesse to how to do that in an effective way. And I think we can really bring a lot of learnings over the past couple of decades on how to do that the right way. There are qualitative aspects to it, quantitative aspects to it. But it's a lot of learnings that we've experienced that we're going to bring to Canada. And then I think you guys will help us modify whatever needs to be modified for the Canadian market.

Ben Felix: That makes a lot of sense. You touched on this in answering Cameron's question, based on your experience with other acquisitions and what you see in PWL, how would you describe how being part of OneDigital is going to make PWL better?

Mike Sullivan: Well, I think that if you think about it from an internal, how do you continue to create opportunities for your teams? I think when you think about going from 100 people to 1,000 people in the marketplace, it creates amazing career path opportunities for folks that are inside PWL today, for teams that are going to join PWL in the future.

For the first time, Ben, and you and I have talked a little bit about this, I've gone through that phase where AI now and what AI is going to do with our business. I've had that mind-blowing experience where I'm like, "It is going to change the advice-giving business. It is going to change how work gets done inside your four walls and our four walls." I think we're going to lead in that regard. And it should significantly help on the growth trajectory in Canada.

Look, we're going to be a capital partner. We want like-minded teams in Canada to understand we are open for business. We are going to build something significant in the marketplace together that we don't think exists in Canada today. So, done the right way, we create a gravitational pull of teams and talent to your organization. And when we get that right, it's going to create a gravitational pull of clients to the same thing because I think we're both 100% in agreement that the solution that's needed at scale in Canada today doesn't exist and that's the flag we want to put in the ground and basically say, "Let's become that company." It's a lot of this operational technology and scaling acumen coupled with capital that's going to, I think, supercharge this build and it's something that I don't think either of us could have done that.

Cameron Passmore: Something I find really interesting is the fact that you and your partner, co-founder Adam Bruckman, are still very, very active in the business and love it clearly. How would you and Adam articulate the objectives you have for OneDigital Canada?

Mike Sullivan: The interesting thing is we talk about this with our investors as well, which is just one of those serendipitous things where our lead PE firm is Onex out of Toronto. We have Canadian investors that are now watching us make the move to build in Canada. But I think you present a unique opportunity for us, and that is apply all our learnings, start with an amazingly talented team. But how do we look at what has evolved over the past 10 to 15 years in the US market and apply – we think we're on the early side of an evolution in the Canadian marketplace that is going to similarly play out than what we've seen play out in the States.

Adam and I are like – it's almost like being able to go back in time and say what decisions would we have made differently, and let's go make those decisions now in Canada because the market is just structurally almost the way we were in the States 10, 15 years ago. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. I just mean it is in an interestingly evolutionary way in terms of the role banks play today and how significant they are. It’s a little bit different. Adam and I talk about we can incubate something special and do it with this amazing team. But I think we're going to make really good decisions and head down a path.

You and I have talked about I don't know exactly what it's going to look like, but I think we're going to end up with amazingly talented people that take care of clients the right way. We're going to scale it differently than what we've seen in the States. It's like take note it took us 20 years to build here and go do it in 5 years in Canada because we can apply the lessons in there.

Ben Felix: Yes, that's really exciting. Cameron, I'd like you to comment on that. Mike, maybe you can share some thoughts too once Cameron shares his, just as the investor in PWL. But, Cameron, can you talk about how this affects stuff like our service offering, how it's going to affect our clients, how it's going to affect our team?

Cameron Passmore: We're a purpose-built firm. We're built to deliver advice. That's our one job, right? Everything we do is revolved around the client relationship. This whole coming together is about improving that, building a better platform to be able to help more people. But our advice teams are absolutely vital as part of what we do. They are effectively our product, our services, our product. We've long dreamed about helping, as we said earlier, many, many more people because we think it's desperately needed.

As you said off the top, Mike, Canada's got some of the highest fees in the world and some of the lowest levels of embracing of systematic or index-type portfolios. You combine that with great advice. We think those are great tailwinds around which to build. We've long felt that. Ben and I have talked about that for years. The opportunity is pretty obvious in Canada, and there is no scaled platform like that in Canada. There's some great advice doing great work as were we, but we're all kind of in our own pockets.

The dream of bringing more and more people together to amplify what we're already doing, I think, is super appealing and have impact on this country, and that's also going to be a whole lot of fun. But the team is very excited. We've had many meetings already, of course, and growth is good. Growth is good for clients. Growth is good for the team. Growth is good for careers. This is all a good new story.

Ben Felix: Any thoughts, Mike?

Mike Sullivan: Again, we are humbled by the opportunity. We think it's a unique opportunity in our life cycle, just because of – we've talked before about where and how dimensional fits, where we've built dimensional. We're building that into the DNA of what we're building as a company, so there's something interestingly symmetrical in terms of how we're thinking about that like you are. I've just come back to it's up to us to get this right and align with the right folks for the right reasons at the right time.

But you guys have already teed up a bunch of discussions. This really is a first for us where we have aligned with a team that has so much visibility and so much credibility in the marketplace that we really are shoulder to shoulder as partners saying we think we're at the starting line of something really special. Have a conversation with us and understand more about this because it's pretty cool, and it's pretty unique.

Ben Felix: Yes. I've been involved in some conversations with clients that we've reached out to and some of them have been worried about stuff like that, which is why I asked about it. But our service is not changing. If anything, it's going to get better. Stuff like our fees are not changing. Our employees, people worry about an acquisition. You're going to lose a bunch of your good people.

Cameron Passmore: Not happening.

Ben Felix: Not happening. We're keeping everybody. Clients are going to maintain the same relationships with the same advisors. All that stuff is staying the same. The way that I really look at this is that as much as it is true that one digital has bought PWL or invested in PWL, you guys are really building around what we have now. It’s not a matter of buying what we had and stripping it of certain things and using certain things. It's like you're taking this thing that you think is pretty cool, and you want to make it better, and you want to grow it in Canada. On day one and day two and year five or whatever, stuff's not going to change. That's not why you bought us.

Cameron Passmore: Yes. You're not going away, Ben. I'm not going away.

Ben Felix: Correct.

Cameron Passmore: In fact, I'm as energized as I've ever been about what we can create together.

Ben Felix: Yes. I think people get nervous about change. But from the perspective of our clients, I don't think anything's immediately changing, and any changes in the future will be for the better.

Mike Sullivan: Yes. I'm thinking, Cam, you and I exchanged text, I think, a couple days ago. It's so rewarding when you sit in my seat and you get a text from someone going, “I can't believe how much fun this is. It's opened this whole new door to the possibilities of what might be.” I always use this sports analogy. We don't want to talk to people necessarily when it's late fourth quarter, and they're trying to figure out what to do. We want to meet a bunch of people at halftime and say, "Can we play the second half together in a way that is much more compelling for the teams that we align with and for clients?" That kind of feels like what we're talking about here.

Ben Felix: One of the things that Cameron and I have talked about a lot over the years is how we could become the mother ship for this type of thinking that the planning first approach, the fiduciary advice, the index/systematic type of investing, the market's work investing, whatever you want to call it. How can we become the place where all of those advisors want to be? Can you talk, Mike, about how being part of OneDigital affects our ability to become that mother ship for like-minded advisors?

Mike Sullivan: Yes. Look, I think that you've outlined it. It's like a client-centric, low-cost, systematic investing. It's a planning first and being a fiduciary. It's just one of those things, Ben, where it never ceases to amaze me how noise in the marketplace can create short-term thinking and people chasing shiny objects when all the math will tell you there's a better way to do this for the long term. We're very much at the mindset that we have found the team that we can build around Canada.

The other aspect of this is you guys have such a presence and visibility in the States and globally that we view this as it is a catalyst. It's like a watershed event for us, where we're helping people understand this is the path we are going on. It's almost like we are taking a pretty large, a billion and a half-dollar firm, top line revenue, that is approaching a bunch of startup businesses like an investor saying, “Let's take all these lessons. Let's apply them to these new verticals. Let's understand it's all about aligning with the right teams at the right time to then grow and be a catalyst for other folks that are looking for the same thing.”

It's a unique opportunity, but I think you guys have influence across the entire globe. We want people to understand we think very similar to the way PWL thinks. It’s still early in the game for us. It's going to impact our DNA.

Ben Felix: I'd love to hear from both of you guys on the profile of advisor that we would like to attract to PWL/OneDigital Canada.

Cameron Passmore: Pretty simple. I mean, it's people that will make us better. There's a lot of great advisors out there that I think are in firms that they might not necessarily be aligned or shoulder to shoulder with an agreement with all their colleagues. There is an amazing energy that happens when you bring great people together. We see it here, Ben, every day when you've got this unbelievable rate across the entire firm, all hundred people. Whether it's marketing, financing, we're all in total alignment about what we want to do.

I would even make a spot that on the advisory group, when you get advice that really agree with how we invest, how we do planning, how we can use tools to do better financial planning, how we can improve, how we communicate with people, how we can use tools that, for example, Braden's been creating like the CPP tool and other tools he's built. This whole thinking, all the thinking that's come out of the podcast, all the research that you have done, this all trickles through how we communicate, how we think, how we work with clients.

It's an unbelievable energy that happens, and advisors know if they embrace that. Advisors out there know if they believe in that. I think there's an incredible opportunity to bring people that might want to be part of something bigger together in this environment. Now we have the experience, the energy, and the culture to be able to amplify what we've been doing and what we dreamed. You and I have dreamed about this, Ben, for years.

Ben Felix: Years.

Cameron Passmore: You know, to bring people like that because it's not in the marketplace today. It isn't. In the marketplace, say, we are roughly something like three, four billion dollars of clients’ money that we help manage. That's a lot of money. But in the marketplace, that's not. There are firms in Canada that have many, many, many multiples more than that. From a big picture standpoint, we have a great opportunity to make a difference for a lot of Canadians and make a difference for a lot of financial planners in this country and create something pretty cool.

Let alone, like I said earlier, the crossover effect into the US marketplace. We have a lot of listeners in the US. There's a lot of advisors that listen in the US. I think we're all creating something equally special on that side as well. What would you add to that, Ben? You know a lot of advisors.

Ben Felix: Yes. I mean, I think one of the incredible things about PWL for advisors is the fact that they're on a team of incredible advisors. The stuff that comes out of our advice team is just crazy. The volume of cases that we see, complex cases and the learning that happens within that advice team is just mind-blowing. We've had advisors join with years of experience doing fairly advanced financial planning. Tell us they learned more in their first six months than the last whatever five years of their career, just because of the volume and the expertise that we have on the team.

I think that is very exciting for someone that wants to be part of that, for someone that thinks about planning and is a real nerd and wants to do the best thing for the client. I think it's a very exciting thing for that type of person to be part of.

Cameron Passmore: They might want to focus on the craft of financial planning, working with clients, and not have to worry about employment contracts or payroll or lease improvements in their office space or whatever. That's great. I've done that for years, so that's what you want to do. But a lot of people don't want to do. They want to master the craft of planning, which is just the beautiful thing to be able to focus on.

Ben Felix: That's the thing is our advice team is focused on giving advice and serving clients. We have got a lot of the other stuff figured out. I mean, PWL has got a pretty robust infrastructure at all levels. Advisors focus on advice, and they're fully supported. We have lots of new clients that are interested in working with us coming in all the time. For an advisor that wants to be a great advisor, focus on advice. Focus on being a bit of a planning geek, and do the right thing for clients. I think it's a pretty exciting place to be.

Cameron Passmore: But you mentioned that growth band. The reality is, Mike, you know this better than us probably. The growth in the industry is very, very low when you take out market growth. Most advisory firms are not growing, and most of the growth is going to the largest. I think a few dozen firms, I think, is what the data shows. Growth is hard, so we have started to figure out that not of getting regular people to reach out for some service. That is another opportunity that I think we can do together is to amplify that and accelerate that kind of growth and get more of our social media exposure going out there. Mike?

Mike Sullivan: What they said. I keep coming back to we are very culturally aligned. We are approaching this with a healthy dose of respectfully guide us on how you think this bill should go. Let's learn from each other in terms of what our experiences have been to date. But I think we're going to find a lot of philosophically aligned folks that want to get to a more efficient, less conflicted environment. The most interesting thing to me is there are an ocean of advisors out there that are trying to understand what comes next.

I have a huge amount of empathy for folks trying to figure out how is OneDigital and PWL different than – and then you fill in the blank. How are they different than these 5 or 10 or 15 other players, many of whom have been in the financial playing wealth management space a lot longer than we have? I think that to do that the right way, you really need to spend time. You need to get to know people. You need to, I think, spend less time in the spreadsheet and more time in the conversation and dinners and lunches to understand do you see the world with similar lens. Like I said, when you get that right, the music just sings. When you get it wrong, it's a real problem from the very beginning. We're going to spend time getting to know people, and I think we're going to find that a lot of people are going to find what it is we're building. Very cool.

Ben Felix: I have one question for Cameron, before we go into the last question for Mike. We've been going through this process for – I mean, you mentioned that you first talked to Mike about 18 months ago. We started getting more serious about it more recently. Then we've been through a serious, serious due diligence process much more recently over the last few months. It's been an incredible learning process going through that and assessing our different options. It was kind of like getting a practical MBA as opposed to an academic one. You kind of seeing how stuff really happens, which was amazing. But I'd be curious, Cameron. Now that we've come out the other side of that, what are you most excited about looking forward?

Cameron Passmore: I would frame it as what do I dream about. This is something Mike has said often to both of us, Ben, is what do you dream about? What could we possibly do? When you think about that, you dream about having a firm that's much larger, that has many more services offered, that is attracting new graduates that want to join the profession of financial planning, that you feared how to build a training program where you're able to onboard. We read statistics like the number of people at Vanguard or other large firms in the US are hiring these great planners out of the different universities in the US. I dream about that, being a great place for people to want to come either as recent grads or have their teams join.

We know incredible professionals, Ben, that would have major impact on how we do what we do and be able to do it better. But to become this hub of excellence in financial planning, in investments, in communication and helping people make better decisions to what sort of services would we want to include. Now, we have the ability for expertise and balance sheet to talk to all kinds of different kinds of service providers. What that might be? You can only imagine. It could be in insurance field. It could be in benefits. It could be in property and casualty. I don't know. I'm just dreaming here.

These are the things that are now possible, but you take this core, which is client obsession. Do the right thing, evidence –based. Anything is possible now, so it's been an amazing few months once you start to think that what you dream. I know it kind of sounds hokey, but it's true. When you dream of this stuff, now we can do it. Who knows who we're going to meet? Who knows who's going to reach out? There might be people out there, advisors out there that have wanted to go down this path of converting their clientele to evidence-based or systematic investing and didn't know how to do it. Well, we could help that happen. We now have the mechanism to do that.

We have a lot of advisors that listen to this. It's well-known that there's a succession problem coming because the average advisor in North America is me and my age, gender and age. That's the reality, and a lot of people don't have that succession part figured out. Well, we could help be part of that if somebody wishes. I mean, I could riff on this all day long, but that's where my head goes.

Ben Felix: Yes. You said it, becoming a hub of excellence for advice and financial planning and communication in Canada by attracting more of the best people. We already have some of the best planners. I tweeted last week that Melissa, one of our planners, got the second highest score on the CFP exam out of roughly 400 candidates. I say that we have the best planners in the country, and it's not a joke. We really do. Attracting more people like that and coming increasingly a hub of excellence, I think, is very exciting.

Then like you said, Cameron, the idea of being able to add other complimentary businesses where we can really wrap our arms around the client and be able to offer hypothetically. Obviously, this is just dreaming, but that's what we're doing here. Being able to offer tax and legal and insurance all under one roof, all under one brand, all under one line of communication. That, to me, is extremely exciting for our advisors but also for our clients.

Cameron Passmore: Continue to build out tools like some of the tools that Braden's been building, the CPP calculator. I think it might become more of the de facto sources of excellence in making that decision. A thousand Canadians turn 65 every day. We put it out there for the public to use, and it's had wild adoption. This is one example. It just helps make us better, make the country better, make advisors better.

Ben Felix: Yes, definitely.

Cameron Passmore: Jump in, Mike. Anything to add to that?

Mike Sullivan: No. Look, I mean, I'm a pretty chatty fellow, but I can listen to you guys all day long. You know what? I think you hit on something that I love and that is a big part of the way I'm wired is dreams. Now, 25 years in, I still dream about the experiences that I want to have with my friends and family. I dream about the company that I think we can build that is going to be truly amazing. The bigger we have gotten, the bigger my dreams have gotten in terms of what we can become. There's no endgame yet. It's just a very interesting dynamic, and I get excited about listening to what gets you guys excited because it changes the aperture of my dreams, and it's pretty cool.

Cameron Passmore: Perfect segue, Mike, to the final question. How do you define success in your life?

Mike Sullivan: I think I started down this path where when I think about just my life, my family, my friends. I'm an Irish Catholic boy from Buffalo. I'm the son of an iron worker. I started very modest in terms of what shaped my view of what I could do and where I could go and how that would all come together. I feel truly blessed to have found a partner in the business 25 years ago. We're like brothers. We're like best friends. That group has just grown and grown and grown. When I think about the two sides of the coin of sort of that picture of Janice looking forward, looking backwards, when it's about life, I get really excited about dreaming, about creating experiences for my friends and family. Position that you give back more than you take in this world, which I think we need a lot more of that.

From a work standpoint,(106:58) I dream about building a company of consequence that doesn't exist in the world today that is desperately needed. I feel like this is an incremental step in that direction. Can we truly impact the lives of millions of people in the future with a solution that is the right solution at the right time in the marketplace, whether it's Canada or the States? My dreams are getting bigger, and I love that part of it. I get to dream with a growing list of people that are helping me reshape that almost every single day, so I feel really blessed in that regard. How about you guys? (107:40)

Cameron Passmore: Ben?

Ben Felix: Are you turning the success question around with us, Mike?

Mike Sullivan: Yes.

Ben Felix: Oh, my. We were asked this. We did the CFA Wealth Management Conference in Toronto, and we were interviewed about our experience with the podcast and how it's affected our business and stuff like that. We were asked this question then. I had never really thought about it until then, but I think my answer is still roughly the same, which is that someone who's successful in life is a standard psychology definition. I don't know. You enjoy how you spend your time day to day, but you can also look back and be satisfied with your overall standing in life because you can enjoy your time day to day by sitting in a hot tub. But then you might look back on your life and be like, “Man, I haven't done anything.” I think it's finding that balance between enjoying how you spend your time day to day and minute to minute, but then also being able to look back and be like, “Yes, I'm really happy with where I am.”

Cameron Passmore: Man, you guys have good answers.

Mike Sullivan: Cam?

Cameron Passmore: I don't remember what I said there, but I think it was something along the lines of I just love getting up in the morning. I love getting up and being charged right out of the gate.

Ben Felix: At 4am. I don't know what time you get up.

Cameron Passmore: I head to the gym, and I just love consuming ideas, and I love executing ideas. I love bouncing ideas off of Ben and the team here like I'm dialed in, dialed up every single day as Lisa can tell you. That I just feel lucky to have ended up in a career, in an industry where you could do this and have this level of creativity that is just so much fun every single day. Yes, it's hard. Yes, there's challenges. Yes, we screw up along the way. But it's that desire to want to solve stuff. We just have this unbelievable team that we've been able to come together with that is a total blast every single day.

I've seen this in the time spent with you, Mike, and the team that it's the same thing. It's great people come together to solve stuff. I've had people reach out to me already from all over the place inside OneDigital, just saying, “Let's work on stuff. We don't have all the answers. Let's just figure it out together.” I just love that. To me, that's success. Of course, great family and healthy kids and all that. All of us would say that, of course, because we're all family people. I dread the day where I get up and always like, "Oh, I don't want to do this again." I've never felt that in all these years. Thirty-four years ago, this month is when I started laughing as an advisor, so it's been amazing.

Mike Sullivan: Look, for additional context, I get asked all the time. We're about to do our fifth private equity trade. I’m 62 years old. I've been chopping wood for a long time, but I love what I do, and I love experiencing things like this. It almost becomes like a drug where you're like, “What is this going to look like three years from now? What is it going to look like five years from now?” When you're focused on becoming better for your clients with people, you actually enjoy going to have a beer or a glass of wine with after work or a cup of coffee. It doesn't happen as often as it should, particularly when you are a firm that does acquisitions.

Somehow, by flipping that switch, this isn't supposed to happen the way it happens. This is normally the way people think. When you make one hire at a time and you build a company one hire at a time. What I think we're proving is you can actually do it via acquisition as well. You just have to approach it differently.

Cameron Passmore: Well put. Great to have you on, Mike. Super fun.

Mike Sullivan: Appreciate it, guys. I can check this off my bucket list now. I've been in the Rational Reminder.

Cameron Passmore: We’ll have to get you some swag.

Mike Sullivan: All right, guys. Thanks a million, and thank you for your trust in making this happen.

Ben Felix: Thanks, Mike.

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