Guest: Omani Carson, Founder of Carson Wealth, Momentis Family Office, and Omya.
In a nutshell: Financial advisors spend a lot of their time helping clients understand that successful planning isn’t about “hitting a number.”
But, deep down, so many advisors are trying to do the exact same thing: achieve a milestone in AUM, families served, or personal income.
And then? After decades spinning on the treadmill? What comes after that number? When you’ve spent your whole career chasing after “more,” what’s left?
On today’s show, I catch up with my old friend and colleague Omani Carson to talk about why true wealth isn’t about the size of your balance sheet. It’s about the quality of your relationships — starting with the relationship you have with yourself.
Omani and I reflect on our 30-year history together, including the 11 years we spent building Peak Advisor Alliance (now Carson Coaching), the foundational business principles we think have stood the test of time, and how our industry needs to evolve at this pivotal moment when AI is on the threshold of massively changing how advisors deliver value.
.Omani Carson and I discuss:
- How Ron Carson stepped off the “hedonic treadmill” and became Omani.
- Omani’s three secrets to success and why he believes they are even more critical today than when he started teaching them to advisors 25 years ago.
- How Omani uses “Hell yes!” and “Hell no!” to protect his time.
- How Omani’s teams are leveraging AI right now and what kinds of gains he’s anticipating in the future.
- Using conscious capitalism to build stronger teams and improve your firm’s total impact.
Omani Carson on upgrading his operating system:
“ The name ‘Ron,’ when I was a kid, I got made fun of — ‘Ronald McDonald’ and all of that. Plus my parents went broke when I was seventeen. They would always confuse that ‘Ron Carson’ with the bankruptcy, even though it was my dad. So I just never liked my name. I did some work with some indigenous chiefs, and they gave me the name ‘Omani’ for the work that we were doing and the vision about having a better world. It means ‘walking into a stiff wind,’ and I just loved it. So my identity went from ‘Ron,’ who stood for an operating system of fear and scarcity — always driving for more and more because I was chasing some feeling that was a mirage — to ‘Omani,’ which is centered around loving abundance. It gave me a portal to really get to know myself. Once I reconciled who I was and how I wanted to show up in the world, I realized that living in full integrity of who you are attracts abundance in droves.”
Omani Carson on how AI will widen the advisor gap:
“I think advisors are going to dramatically underestimate the magnitude of these AI models and what they can do. Our AI ran a 550-page tax return almost instantly and identified $56,000 in mistakes for a very high-net-worth client. It immediately wrote up an assessment of what needed to be done and amended, completely bypassing the massive fees and time delays usually associated with a traditional tax team. In another instance, it analyzed a divorce decree in seconds and found the client was overpaying alimony by $156,000. People have been talking about fee compression forever, but it really hasn’t happened. With AI, you are going to be expected to do much more for the same price. You better be able to do more, because if you are an advisor that isn’t leveraging this technology to elevate your value, you are going to have to lower your fees, and eventually, you will just lose the client entirely.”
Omani Carson on the value of “belly-to-belly” advice and living in “creator mode”:
“We’re going to just crave human connection. ‘Human-made’ will be the most powerful brand out there. We’re creatures that really need proximity to one another and we’re going the opposite direction. And I think there’s going to be a huge backlash. I think the financial advisor that’s directly meeting with the client, belly to belly, is two decades from even being close to being replaced. And I don’t know if they ever will.
“For really great financial advisors, not a better time to be in this profession. The value we add is incredible. If I could do it all over again, the things that I would do is love your life every day. ‘Live like you’re gonna die tomorrow, but learn like you’re gonna live forever.’ Be a librarian, not a library. Position yourself as a quarterback. Delegate. Release. Enjoy the business. Go through that process of going into creator mode and saying, who do you really want to be and what makes you happiest? And everything else will key off of that.”
