David Steele, serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors, is driven by a simple but powerful mission: helping people. Whether through wealth management, hospitality ventures, or advising founders and leadership teams, David sees all of his businesses through one lens—service, care, and improving the lives of the people they touch.

We explore David’s OKR Goal Setting Framework—a practical system for turning intention into results: identify, articulate, share, measure, and execute. David explains why limiting goals to just a few priorities creates clarity, how articulating and sharing them builds accountability, and why consistent measurement and execution are what ultimately drive outcomes. He also shares how this framework applies differently in life versus business, why simplicity beats complexity in strategic planning, and how a hospitality mindset fuels both growth and long-term client loyalty.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is David Steele, a serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors. David, welcome to the show. 

Oh, thanks for having me. 

Well, great to have you. You have a very interesting career and interesting businesses, and you keep a lot of balls in the air. So I’d like to dig in. I was very interested in what I read on your website about your personal mission and why you do things. So would you mind sharing with our listeners what your personal “why” is and how you are manifesting it in your business and businesses? 

My personal why—it’s always people. And everything I've done in my life is about figuring out ways that I can help people.
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And for us, it’s like—that’s commoditized. Everybody’s doing the same stuff.

Our value proposition is that there is nobody who will envelop you with more care, love, service, attentiveness, responsiveness, and proactiveness in the industry than we will.
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I’m the board of a coffee shop company, another restaurant company, a music band management company, and a music production company. And

my view on all of those is that I'm there to provide hospitality and service to the founders and the executive teams of those companies. So for me, it’s all about people.
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Very interesting. I mean, the hospitality angle and the quality-of-life angle—I saw it on your website. You really don’t talk about financial performance there at all. You talk about how to improve the life of your clients. That’s kind of the big theme there. And I like the blogs as well—that also comes back to the quality-of-life theme. So anyhow, I don’t want to get too deep into this, because what I’m curious about is frameworks. This is a podcast about frameworks, and I wonder—what is the framework that has worked in your life that is simple to explain, maybe three to five steps, that you could share with the audience? Something they could use to help their own businesses or themselves by implementing or thinking about things in a clearer, simpler way.

It’s so basic. The key to life, in my mind, is so basic. Identify goals—two to four. More than five is probably too many. And I don’t care if it’s for your business, your life, a relationship—I don’t care what it is. Actually identify those goals. Articulate those goals—clear, concise, as few words as possible. Try to apply some type of measurement to those goals. And then once those goals are articulated, you can measure them, whether they succeed or fail. It becomes pretty clear what a strategic plan might look like to achieve those goals. And I think that goal setting is human magic. 

I’ve written a couple of life plans throughout my life, and I never looked at them again after writing them—until many, many years later. And lo and behold, I achieved everything I’d written on those life plans. I usually don’t look at them for 10 years. And

I just think the clear articulation of the goal, sharing the goals with people—because then you become accountable, to yourself and to them—it’s out in the world. You’re going to achieve those things.
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Okay, so identify, articulate, share, measure, and execute—is that the framework? 

That’s it. 

Yeah. Love it. That’s great. Yeah, I mean, goals do have a magic to them, so if you don’t ever look at them, how do you not forget them? 

I think that’s the human magic part. I mean, for a business, I do believe goal setting and strategic planning should be a continual process. For life planning, I think it’s probably okay to articulate your goals and maybe not look at them again. And I don’t necessarily think for life planning you need to have a written strategic plan. The human magic part is that if you say you want to do something in life, and you articulate it and you share it with people, the human magic part is it’s now present forever in your subconscious. And so energetically, you’re going to, I think, very naturally orient yourself around those goals just simply in your everyday existence. And I think that’s for maybe for life planning. For businesses, I do think it’s best to have a framework for this, and so my businesses use, and I don’t care what the framework is—we use objectives and key results, OKRs. They’re pretty commonly used now.

And I don’t care if you use KPIs, OKRs, or whatever it may be. You and your team should sit down each year, and ideally you already have a long-term vision for the company, which should be pretty concise and focused. And then your annual goal setting in between and what I’ll call tactical plans or mini strategic plans that you can then look at each quarter.

With the objectives and key results, we assign a leader to each objective. The leader understands that they are tasked with organizing the necessary team members to achieve the goal.
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We have key results that we define in our annual strategic planning meeting, and then we have quarterly check-ins. I’m the CEO of the financial planning company, so I check in with each leader every quarter to see how they’re progressing on their objectives and the key results for those objectives. And then for the restaurant companies, I am the executive chairman of both of them and a co-founder. I meet with the CEO, and then the CEO meets with the team to check in on their progress of their goals. So the human magic part is this idea that you can just say, “I want to do this thing,” write it down, and not look at it again. But for business, I do think it requires a more consistent, structured, written approach. 

So help me with these OKRs. I mean, I’m familiar with the OKRs, but what I’ve always wondered is, when you have key results for every objective, then is this not too limiting in terms of having to choose the kind of objective which you can measure with the key results, as opposed to—and maybe this is my blind spot here. Maybe there are objectives that don’t really lend themselves to regular measurement of key results, but because they are maybe binary. Either we acquired this new location or we didn’t, there’s not really much key results other than it has to be a size, profitability, whatever. So I don’t know—maybe I’m rambling here—but what’s your view on this? 

Well, I mean, I would push back a little bit on that. Let’s say your objective is to acquire—through vertical or horizontal integration—another business. I think a key result could be, over the course of the year: what is the process by which you’re identifying potential companies to acquire? What is your vetting process? What is the activity around outreach, vetting, and analysis? Maybe sometimes there’s a bit of a square peg, round hole problem with this, but I don’t think there’s a negative to articulating the binary objective, even if it’s imperfect key results that you’re going to be using to measure them.

Yeah, I think I need more clarity on this. I always thought of the two sides of the coin is you’ve got the easily measurable things, which typically pertain to the business—growing the business, executing processes, doing sales activities, this kind of stuff, which is working on the present. And then you have those bigger—what do you call them—OKRs or Rocks—those big objectives that is going to build more capacity in your business for the future so that you can expand the business. That might be hiring a key executive to own your marketing function, where key results are maybe trickier to define, but it’s really important for the future. Do you see any distinction between these two? 

I mean, maybe—but let’s go back to the original point. What started this conversation was that I think you should have a framework. I don’t really care what the framework is. All I’m arguing for is identifying and articulating goals, and figuring out some kind of strategic planning process to achieve those goals. I actually don’t really care what it is. I’ve consulted with a number of businesses—helping entrepreneurs start businesses, probably close to eight now—and I’m always surprised that something as simple as writing down goals, articulating them, measuring them, and building a plan around them is not natural to most people. I think if people just start with the basics, they’re already ahead of most. And this is about as basic as it gets. 

Yeah, that’s true. So what drives growth in your business, in the One Wealth Advisors business? 

We’re in a very luxurious position, and I tell people I’m the richest person they’ve ever met. And people are like, “What?” And I say, “Well, I have everything I want, and you can’t be richer than that. There’s no such thing as richer than having everything you want,” at least the way I define it. And where I’m going with this is—I’ve tried to espouse a philosophy across the company that every team member should spend less than they make, no matter what. And not overextend themselves with commitments—like a mortgage—that causes stress and anxiety and so forth and so on. So there’s a fiscal discipline and that’s espoused across each team member, and most importantly, me and my brother—we started the company together, and we’re the major shareholders. If we take that approach, that’s number one. The second thing is—we don’t have any sales, marketing, or business development efforts whatsoever, which is shocking to 99% of business people I talk to.

But it’s grounded in a philosophy that the greatest salespeople we’re ever going to have are our clients—talking to their friends and their network. And if we put literally 100% of our effort into serving our clients for free—they’ll spread the word. They’ll be so excited about what we do for them and with them that they will be more than willing that if somebody asks them who they should talk to or work with, the answer is us. We’ve been doing that for almost 20 years now. The practice started 35 years ago, but we’ve been operating this way for almost 20 years. 

And our annual growth rate is about 20% a year, without any business development or marketing whatsoever. We could probably be growing more than that, but we keep our spending in check. We don’t overextend ourselves, so it doesn’t force us to stay on that treadmill. The idea of being on a treadmill—having to grow just to keep up—causes me stress and anxiety, and I don’t like that. So that’s One Wealth. Now, restaurants are a less good business. My financial planning company will do seven and a half million in revenue this year with 13 employees.

My first restaurant company will do $30 million in revenue with 350 employees. It’s a much more labor-intensive, harder business. And the people I started the restaurant companies with—just to be blunt—for them to build wealth so they can afford to take care of their families the way they deserve to, for their talents and their creativity, et cetera, et cetera, you need to grow. And so the way we define growth in the restaurant company, just frankly, is through building the organizations so they are ready to scale. 

That means having leadership that’s trained, has mastery, and understands how to lead each level of layers of management, and then opening new restaurants. Or with one of our companies, it’s a line of consumer packaged goods. The Flour + Water Hospitality Group is my first restaurant company, and we’ve launched frozen pizza in 40 grocery stores, and we have dried pasta in 75 stores now. And we’re going to really try to grow that. And that’s measurable, right? It’s new restaurants, more grocery stores, more revenue. So we’re a bit more intentional about growing those businesses. 

That’s really interesting. So when you grow an asset management firm by 20% over 20 years, then maybe half of that comes from the appreciation of the assets, doesn’t it?

No—and I know where your head went, which is the S&P 500 has grown at about 10% a year over the last 100 years. But the truth is, about 55% of our clients’ assets are in equities on average, and about 45% are in bonds. If you’re younger, you have more equities; if you’re older, you have less. But the average annual return for a portfolio like that is probably closer to about 6.5%. So about a third of our growth has probably come through market appreciation. We don’t generally lose clients, so your math is clean, right? If we lost clients, we’d have attrition and would need to replace them, which doesn’t really happen for us. So about maybe two-thirds of our growth has come from referrals. 

Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I mean, I’ve also learned that if you have a business with high churn, then you have no time to serve your customers. 

And if you’re spending a lot of effort on business development, you’re spending less time on serving your customers, and you’re going to have higher churn. 

They’re not going to refer you, because they’re not getting great service—and then they churn instead of referring. So it’s very smart. 

We do an annual survey of our clients, and we always score above 95% in terms of satisfaction. We also do an annual survey with our team members, and we score really high there as well. The greatest evidence of that is our turnover is damn near 0% since we launched the company. Generally, people who work with us don’t leave us. 

That’s awesome. So you’re doing a lot of things right. It seems like you have a clear plan, you’ve got strategic planning, you understand what you want, what you need, what you don’t need. What is one thing that you are actively trying to figure out in the asset management business?

Well, we launched—unfortunately—a tax practice this year. I say “unfortunately” because we had no interest in competing with CPAs. Historically, we referred our clients to CPAs. But there’s a problem in the tax business. My assessment is that taxes are becoming more complex, not less. Less people want to become accountants and there’s a supply-demand problem with accountants. And the existing accountants, in my view, have taken on too many clients, and their service has deteriorated. We get more and more complaints about clients dissatisfaction with their accountants than anything else in our practice. So we finally said, “You know what? 

We’re going to beta test a tax practice.” We’re doing tax returns this year for 15 clients. I never wanted to do this type of business. It actually makes sense, because financial planning and tax are deeply intertwined. The fact that they were ever separate disciplines, in retrospect, doesn’t make much sense. So I’m glad I’m being forced into it—but it’s a problem. I’m not sure how good we are at it yet. I hope we don’t mess it up too much this year with these 15 clients, and I hope we eventually really good at it. But it’s the problem for me, and I’m not happy about it. 

So you said there are 13 people in the wealth management, so you have a couple of people on the tax side? 

Yeah, we have, call it, one and a half people dedicated to tax. And then we’ve partnered—well, there’s one more variable in tax, which is interesting. I believe AI will eventually do 90-plus percent of the work that an accountant does. There’s an intersection—or an inflection point—that hasn’t been hit yet, which is: fewer accountants, more complex tax work, and AI hasn’t solved it yet. My hypothesis is that we can start to develop the muscle memory and mastery around doing tax. Eventually, AI will be such a strong support that we’ll be able to do tax returns for all of our clients with a relatively small number of people.

That’s our hypothesis. In the interim, we’ve partnered with a company called April, which is a venture-backed startup that provides the analysis and tax return preparation. So we have one and a half people who organize the tax work for our client base, but then the actual heavy lifting of the analysis is done by April. And if April is listening to this, it’s fine when I say we’re perfectly happy to replace April with AI once AI is ready—but it just isn’t ready yet. So we’re just getting started on something that we believe will eventually become relatively easy. But right now, it’s still a bit clunky. 

I don’t know if it was Warren Buffett or someone else—maybe his partner—who talked about how important tax planning is in actually making money. If you do the right kind of tax planning, it’s basically one half of the return you can make just by optimizing your taxes. Would you agree with that? 

Well, I don’t know that I’d be comfortable making a blanket statement like “one half.” I think the wealthier you are, the higher the probability that with advanced tax planning, the net impact on your wealth over time could be more than half.

I mean, think about estate planning. We have a client, for example—a taxable estate is one where your net worth is over, I’m going to simplify, about $13 million per person. So for a married couple, $26 million. Anything over that gets taxed at—again, I’m averaging—around a 50% estate tax when you die. Okay, so what can you do? You can, while you’re alive, give away some of that $13 million instead of waiting until you die. How can you do that? Maybe you make investments in your kids’ names rather than your own, so it’s not part of that $13 million. We had a client, for example, who invested in a company that ended up being worth $60 million.

But guess what? That $60 million was not in their name—it was in their kid’s name. So it skipped a generation. So what is that worth? Fifty percent of anything over $26 million in estate tax—what is that worth in terms of average annual return? I don’t know—you can’t really calculate it cleanly. But it’s millions and millions of dollars.

Yeah, so it’s very high leverage—that’s the point. 

Yeah. 

That’s amazing. I mean, you shared some really great ideas here. I like the framework: identify your goals, articulate them, share them with other people. I like the sharing because it basically creates some peer accountability, right? And also people are then aligned with what your context is. So that’s great. Then measure and execute—that’s great. We talk about OKRs, we talk about tax planning, and the philosophy of building businesses—the difference between a business that needs to grow and one that can grow more organically. That’s amazing. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience? And then I’m going to ask you, of course, if people would like to learn more about what you do and would like to learn more about One Wealth Advisors, where should they go and where can they learn more? But first, what’s your final message to our listeners?

Well, you didn’t rehash the first thing I said, which is—it’s always about people. It’s always about people. Everything one does in life, in my opinion, should be in the service of others somehow. And I think that’s what gives us our greatest sense of satisfaction, self-worth, and place in the world. So I really want to leave people with that message.

In terms of reaching me, I have a website I built, because I do a bunch of different things. One Wealth Advisors has its own website, which you can easily search, but I also have davidsteele.xyz, which primarily points to One Wealth, but then points to the other stuff I do, including other businesses I’ve started, and the boards I’m on, and the consulting work that we do.

Okay, that’s definitely worth exploring. So check it out. And if you enjoyed this conversation and you’re listening here, don’t forget to subscribe and tune in, because every week I have an exciting entrepreneur coming on the show to share their learnings and insights.