Guests: Dennis Morton and Katie Brown, the co-founders of Morton Brown Family Wealth in Allentown, PA. Dennis and Katie started their firm from scratch in 2018 and have grown it to more than $400 million in AUM.

In a nutshell: Building a thriving advisory firm from the ground up is a significant challenge. Building that firm successfully with a business partner can be even more demanding. But Dennis Morton and Katie Brown shared a “Day 1” vision for what they wanted their firm to be, and they’ve followed that vision to extraordinary success.

On today’s show, Dennis Morton and Katie Brown share their intentional approach to building and managing their firm, including defining their brand DNA, targeting ideal clients, and complementing each other’s individual leadership strengths.

.Dennis Morton, Katie Brown, and I discuss:

  • Delivering holistic service to Morton Brown’s ideal clients, whom they define as “leaders, family business owners, and executives.”
  • Why clear communication, transparency, and optimism have become cornerstones of Morton Brown’s culture.
  • How setting a big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG) of reaching $1 billion in AUM within 10 years has motivated their team, shaped their strategic decisions, and helped attract and retain top talent.
  • The industry “problem” Dennis and Katie set out to solve via exceptional service and consistent growth.
  • Why putting together a great team is an ongoing process, and how checking in with that team has shaped Dennis and Katie’s approach to key policies like remote work.
  • Helping clients find “peace” and define their “enough.”

. Quotes: 

Katie Brown on defining leadership skillsets and roles: 

“In launching the firm, we stuck within our historical lanes of the experience that we had as we were dividing the tasks of putting the firm together. So Dennis took more of a leadership role in figuring out the investment process that we were going to use and the strategies we were going to build and how we’re going to incorporate those and how we’re going to develop business. Whereas I focused more on the financial planning technology platform, how we’re going to migrate all the data, a lot of the operational items as well, because a large piece of my background is operations and compliance. But I think our roles probably started to overlap and merge together. And just recently, we’ve been putting a lot more work into defining our roles better going forward. So I feel as if we started further spread in our skill sets, we overlapped, and a lot of that was to gain an understanding of what we were each doing, making sure that we had consistencies in our processes across all the business functions and the service model offerings. But now we’re reaching a point where it’s important for us to become specialized again.”

Dennis Morton on using transparency and storytelling to strengthen culture:

“ There’s a word that’s come up a few times in both the hiring process and when people speak about the hiring process after they’ve been on the team for a little while: it’s this idea of transparency.  One of our team members says he always remembers that he walked in for an interview, and we said, ‘What would you put up on a billboard if you could?’ We just caught him completely off guard. And he said, ‘I just loved that question. You guys gave your answers. I gave mine. It felt very transparent and just easy and flowing.’ And I think we’ve tried to do that, even with just the design of our office and the way we share stories about ourselves. I think our team knows every backstory that Katie and I have in this profession, and it encourages them to share stories about what they’re going through with clients. And that storytelling and communication, I think, has really helped the culture to take hold.”

Katie Brown on the firm’s BHAG:

“Dennis and I worked together for about 10 years at a previous firm. And at that previous firm, one of the things that we had struggled with was a clear vision for the future. We struggled as a team to put that clear vision together. And so in launching Morton Brown, Dennis and I were very focused on, ‘Let’s paint the picture, let’s keep the team informed, let’s make sure we’re all moving in the same direction.’ And so the idea of painting the picture, the vision and the growth and the possibilities and getting buy-in from everybody of what that means across the board — it’s not just a numbers thing. It means we’re serving more families. We’re bigger supporters in our community. We’re able to invest in our technology and the office environment that we create and all these great things that go along with the growth. So I think that was a huge contributor to us putting that BHAG together. And then also just the benefit of writing it down and talking out loud — the goal-setting process and how it just helps to align and become a filter for all the things that we do.”

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