The Influential Advisor Podcast

Scott Leibfried's grandfather sold the family business at 60 with more money than he'd ever seen. He was generous, he lived long, and he ran out. That story is why Scott has spent 28 years in wealth management — and it's why he wrote Climbing Wealth.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Gabe sits down with Scott Leibfried, a Midwest-based financial advisor with 28 years of experience, to explore the parallels between mountain climbing and financial planning. From the moment Scott summited Long's Peak without a guide and couldn't wait to get back down, to guiding clients through the retirement red zone, this conversation is full of practical lessons about what it takes to navigate the second half of your financial life. Listeners will walk away with a clearer picture of what a real advisory team looks like, what triggers people to finally get serious, and why the descent matters just as much as the climb.

About Scott Leibfried

Scott Leibfried is a financial advisor and wealth manager with 28 years of experience, based in the Midwest. He grew up in eastern Iowa working in his family's agricultural business and attended the University of Northern Iowa before entering the financial services industry. Over his career, Scott has built a multi-generational, multi-specialist advisory team focused on financial planning, investment management, tax strategy, and estate planning. He is the author of Climbing Wealth, which draws on his experiences summiting mountains including Mont Blanc, the Grand Teton, and Grand Paradiso to illustrate the decisions that define financial success.

What We Cover

• How Scott's grandfather selling the family business became the origin of his entire career — and what two small decisions would have changed everything
• The shift from a commission-driven industry to a planning-first model, and why it matters for clients today
• What happened on Long's Peak without a guide that convinced Scott to never climb — or advise — alone again
• The retirement red zone: the five years before and after retirement when the most consequential financial decisions get made
• Why a real advisory team is built across generations and specialties, not just people sharing a copier
• The story of a client who retired at 58 against one advisor's advice — and used those five years before his death to live fully

Resources Mentioned

• Climbing Wealth by Scott Leibfried — available on Amazon

Connect with Scott Leibfried

• Email: [email protected]

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Most successful people have a retirement number. Very few have a retirement reason.

That's the gap Jason Wendt has spent 15 years closing. After watching client after client arrive with a solid portfolio and a hollow plan, he wrote a book about it. And now, fresh off an Amazon bestseller ranking and a feature segment on NBC Chicago, he's bringing that message to a wider audience.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Gabe McManus sits down with Jason Wendt, a Chicago-based financial advisor and author of Beyond the Numbers, to explore what it really means to build a financially efficient life. Jason shares why he starts every client relationship with the question "What's important about money to you?" rather than a statement of assets. He talks about the three phases of financial life most advisors forget to address, how childhood money narratives quietly shape the decisions of even the wealthiest clients, and why he considers himself the CEO of his clients' financial lives. Jason walks through the specific frameworks, client stories, and planning tools he uses to help people move from saving for a number to building a life around what actually matters to them.

About Jason Wendt

Jason Wendt, AIF®, APMA®, CEPA®, is a financial advisor at Ameriprise Financial in Chicago, Illinois, with over 15 years of experience serving high achievers, business owners, and professionals navigating complex financial lives. He holds the Accredited Investment Fiduciary, Accredited Portfolio Management Advisor, and Certified Exit Planning Advisor designations. Jason is the author of Beyond the Numbers: A High Achiever's Guide to Financial Freedom Without Sacrifice, an Amazon bestseller in the financial services category. He recently appeared as a financial expert on NBC Chicago and has been invited to speak at universities in the Chicagoland area.

What We Cover

• Why Jason's first question to every new client is "What's important about money to you?" and how that one question changes the entire planning process
• The three phases of financial life: accumulation, distribution, and enjoyment, and why most financial plans never address the third one
• How childhood money narratives keep wealthy clients from enjoying what they've built
• What financial paralysis looks like for high-earning professionals and business owners, and how to break through it
• Why Jason positions himself as the CEO of his clients' financial lives, with a network of 17 specialists across insurance, estate planning, taxes, and investment management
• Proactive vs. reactive tax strategy: asset location, Roth conversions, and why timing matters more than most people realize

Connect with Jason Wendt

• Website: beyondthenumbersbook.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jasonwendt
• Email: [email protected]
• Book: Beyond the Numbers on Amazon

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Most business owners assume their advisory team is working for them. A CPA here, a financial advisor there, an attorney on retainer. What they don't realize is that those advisors are working in parallel, not together. No one is seeing the full picture. No one is coordinating. And the business owner, without ever signing up for it, becomes the quarterback of their own financial life on top of running their company.

That's what the Virtual Family Office Advantage exists to solve. And according to Dale Montgomery, a Certified VFO Professional who has worked with business owners for over a decade, what they're losing without it goes beyond taxes and missed strategies. It shows up in their marriages, their family dinners, and the mental load they carry home every night.

In this episode, Dale draws on his own experience losing a real estate portfolio, rental properties, and his hobby farm in 2008, while raising four young kids under the age of seven, to explain why coordinated, team-based planning isn't a luxury. That experience changed the way he thought about planning. It turned him into a practitioner of something most advisors never discuss with their clients: the Virtual Family Office model, first pioneered by John D. Rockefeller in 1882 and now accessible to small and mid-sized business owners through a team-based, coordinated approach.

About Dale Montgomery

Dale Montgomery is a Certified VFO Professional and Director of Advanced Planning at Tax and Retirement Specialists. After losing his real estate portfolio in 2008 while raising four young children, he rebuilt his career around a single question: what would better planning have changed? That path led him to the Virtual Family Office model, where he now coordinates integrated planning across tax, legal, risk, wealth, and business advisory for small and mid-sized business owners. He is the author of The Virtual Family Office Advantage: From Siloed Advice to Team-Based Planning.

What We Cover

• Why successful business owners become the de facto quarterback of their own advisor team, and what that coordination burden is actually costing them
• How the hub-and-spoke model and the Director of Advanced Planning role removes the business owner from the center of that coordination
• The difference between tax mitigation and tax deferral, and why putting money into a qualified plan often creates a bigger tax problem down the road
• The wealth paradox: why business owners running multimillion-dollar companies often have surprisingly little personal wealth outside the business
• The client who said "don't sell me life insurance" three times, and what the VFO diagnostic found underneath that resistance
• Why giving business owners their time back doesn't just grow revenue. It saves marriages.

Resources Mentioned

• The Virtual Family Office Advantage: From Siloed Advice to Team-Based Planning by Dale Montgomery

Connect with Dale Montgomery

• Website: trsfamilyoffice.com
• Email: [email protected]

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She called her advisor on closing day. Boxes still everywhere, no movers available, hours until she had to be out. He showed up in his truck, spent four hours hauling boxes to a friend's garage, and wouldn't let her pay a dime. That's the kind of advisor Dan Carver is, and that story tells you more about his practice than any credential ever could.

Dan Carver is a St. Louis-based financial advisor with 26 years of experience helping ordinary people make smart decisions with their money. His book, Blue Jean Millionaire, takes its title from a formative observation Dan made in high school: the wealthiest kids in his class were often the ones in jeans and flannel, driving beat-up cars, quietly letting their money work. The flashy ones were a different story. That early lesson has shaped how Dan advises clients ever since.

In this episode, Dan joins Gabe McManus for a wide-ranging conversation on what real wealth looks like, the hidden dangers of financial disorganization, and how good advisors push clients toward decisions they'd rather avoid. Dan shares stories from 26 years in the field — a million-dollar 401k with no beneficiary, a carpenter who needed life insurance and didn't want to hear it, nurses burned out by COVID who needed a new plan fast, and couples who looked wealthy from the outside but were drowning in debt.

About Dan Carver Dan Carver is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP) based in St. Louis, Missouri, with 26 years of experience in financial advising. He specializes in helping middle-class families and everyday investors build long-term financial security through disciplined, conservative planning. Dan is the author of Blue Jean Millionaire, a personal finance book for people who want to build real wealth — not through windfalls or speculation, but through good decisions made consistently over time.

Connect with Dan Carver

• 📧 [email protected]
• 📞 314-626-4900
• 🌐 bluejeanwealthbook.com

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Most retirees nail the math. Then they hit a wall.

Jim Charles retired in 2021 after more than three decades in financial services. He had the savings, the freedom, and a 90-year-old house full of doors that needed rehanging. Within 18 months, he decided to un-retire. Not because the money ran out, but because the meaning had. That experience became the foundation for Sanctuary Financial Planning, the flat-fee firm he co-founded with his wife Sarah, and for their new book, From Work to What's Next.

In this episode, Jim and Sarah Charles join Gabe McManus to make the case that most financial advisors are solving only half the retirement problem. The numbers are table stakes. What most clients haven't done is the meaning work — and they don't find that out until it's too late.

Jim brings over three decades of financial services experience, including his role as co-Head of Dimensional Fund Advisors' North American institutional distribution, where he worked with some of the largest institutional investors in the world. Sarah spent more than two decades at top advisory firms building a $200M+ practice, with a specialty in women's financial empowerment. Together, they hold credentials including CFP®, CFA®, CDFA®, AIF®, and CSRIC®, and launched Sanctuary Financial Planning in 2023 to deliver transparent, flat-fee, fiduciary advice built around the whole person, not just the balance sheet.

Resources Mentioned:

• From Work to What's Next: Designing a Life You Don't Want to Retire From by Jim and Sarah Charles
• The New Retirement Mentality by Mitch Anthony

Connect with Jim and Sarah Charles:

• Website: sanctuaryfinancialplanning.com
• Jim on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jim-charles
• Sarah on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sarah-k-charles

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At the Exit Planning Institute CEPA Summit in Nashville, 1,200 credentialed advisors gathered in one room. The first night, they held an awards ceremony. Every single person who walked on stage had one thing in common. It wasn't their credentials, their AUM, or their years in practice. It was a book.

Episode Summary

Paul and Gabe McManus just returned from four days in Nashville at the EPI CEPA Summit, where they presented the Authority Operating System to one of the most credentialed audiences in financial services. In this episode, they break down all five pillars of the AOS: writing the right book, activating clients and COIs, building a guest podcast tour, optimizing for search everywhere (not just Google), and leveraging AI without the slop. Real client stories throughout. Real results.

About Paul & Gabe McManus

Paul G. McManus is the CEO and founder of The Short Book Formula, a publishing company that has helped 500+ financial professionals write, publish, and leverage books over the past decade. He is the author of The Short Book Formula and Book Marketing for Financial Advisors, and was featured on Michael Kitces' Financial Advisor Success Podcast (Episode 417). Gabe McManus is Director of Elite Advisor Programs and author of Sharpen Your Message: Guest Podcasting for Financial Advisors.

What We Cover

• Why every award recipient at the Nashville CEPA Summit had a book, and what that pattern means for your practice
• The three objections every advisor raises before writing a book: "I'm not a writer," "I don't know what to write about," and "I don't have time" — answered directly and practically
• How Joe Falbo spent 30 years trying to get CPA referrals, published one book, and ended his next lunch with that CPA ordering 500 copies to mail to his entire client list on his own letterhead
• How Jason Wendt turned a book launch party on a yacht into a recurring financial commentary slot on NBC Chicago
• Why Google now accounts for only about 20% of search, and where the other 80% of your prospects are asking questions
• The difference between AI slop and using AI to genuinely extend your reach once the book exists
• Why the book is the foundation: guest podcasting, media, COI referrals, and AI discoverability all start there

Resources Mentioned

• Book Marketing for Financial Advisors by Paul G. McManus
• Sharpen Your Message: Guest Podcasting for Financial Advisors by Gabe McManus
• Exit Planning Institute (EPI) — exit-planning-institute.org
• The Short Book Formula

Connect with Paul & Gabe

• Website: influentialadvisor.com
• Paul on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paulgmcmanus
• Gabe on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gabemcmanus

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The Authority Operating System: Turn Your CEPA Credential Into Deal Flow

You earned your CEPA credential. You know how to help business owners navigate the biggest financial decision of their life.

But the business owners who need you most don't know you exist.

Right now, someone in your market is asking ChatGPT who they should trust with the sale of their company. They're searching Google. They're listening to podcasts. They're forming opinions about who the expert is long before they ever pick up the phone. By the time they're ready to talk, they've already chosen someone.

The question is whether that someone is you.

You can read or listen to this entire book in about an hour. By the time you're done, you'll have the complete system.

The Authority Operating System is a five-pillar framework designed specifically for Certified Exit Planning Advisors who want to turn their credential into consistent, high-quality deal flow. Paul G. McManus has spent the past decade working with more than 500 financial professionals, many of them CEPAs, helping them write and publish books and then leverage those books to grow their practices. That work has helped generate over $100 million in combined revenue. This book lays out the exact system that separates advisors who get found from advisors who get overlooked.

The five pillars work together as a system, not as five separate marketing tactics. The real power shows up when all five are running at once.

The Book puts your thinking, your frameworks, and your client stories into a business owner's hands before you ever meet them. Business owners who read it show up to the first meeting pre-sold, with specific questions, ready to work together.

Referrals and Centers of Influence. Your clients and your COIs want to refer you. They just don't have a natural way to do it. The book becomes the vehicle. When a CPA hands your book to a business owner, the dynamic shifts from "call my guy" to "read this, I think it's exactly what you need."

The Virtual Speaking Tour. Guest podcasting puts you in front of audiences that already trust the host, and that trust extends to you the moment you're introduced. Every episode is a permanent, indexed asset that works for you long after the recording ends.

Search Everywhere Optimization. Google now accounts for less than 20% of daily searches. Business owners are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools who they should work with, and those tools are answering with names. This pillar covers SEO, AEO (answer engine optimization), and GEO (generative engine optimization) so your name shows up wherever your ideal clients are looking.

Leverage AI. What used to require a marketing team and months of effort can now be executed by one motivated advisor with the right tools. From AI-powered meeting prep to turning a single podcast appearance into months of content, this pillar shows you how to build in a year what used to take a decade.

One financial advisor published his book and, within months, landed a recurring role as the financial expert on NBC 5 Chicago, leapfrogging advisors with decades more experience. Another advisor tripled his revenue in a single year after publishing and is now writing his fourth book. A CPA firm distributed 500 copies of an advisor's book to their entire client base, on their own letterhead, without being asked twice. A five-person RIA is using AI to build fully interactive, custom-branded client proposals that no competitor in their market can match. And one CEPA is building a practice with so much transferable value that he's selling equity in it repeatedly, living the same methodology he teaches his clients.

Every advisor in this book did it. The system works. Somewhere in your market, a business owner is searching right now. Make sure they find you.

About the Author

Paul G. McMa

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A $200 million exit — and the client who should have been celebrating, but wasn't. That's what started the Exit Planning Institute. And it's the same story Scott Snider has lived himself: a successful business sale in his mid-20s followed by two years of feeling completely lost. Identity, purpose, what comes next — these are questions the transaction doesn't answer. Exit planning does.

Episode Summary

In this conversation, Paul sits down with Scott Snider, President of the Exit Planning Institute (EPI), ahead of the 2026 CEPA Summit in Nashville. Scott walks through the founding story of EPI, his own journey as an exited business owner turned professional education leader, and the near-crisis moment in 2020 that forced him to rethink everything — not just his business model, but the culture he had been building around himself. He also breaks down the Value Acceleration Methodology in plain language and explains why exit planning isn't about selling your company. It's about running a better business right now.

About Scott Snider

Scott Snider is the President of the Exit Planning Institute (EPI) and Operating Partner of Snider Premier Growth. A nationally recognized growth specialist and lifetime entrepreneur, Scott launched his first business at 16 and sold it in his mid-20s — an experience that shaped his deep understanding of what owners face emotionally and financially in a transition. Since purchasing EPI with his father Chris Snider in 2012, Scott has scaled the organization from 120 members to over 11,000 CEPAs across 19 countries. He is also a former professional indoor soccer player in the Major Arena Soccer League.

What We Cover

• How Scott's personal exit at 24 — profitable but emotionally unprepared — became the foundation of everything he now teaches
• Why EPI pivoted its entire credentialing program to virtual in 45 days during COVID, and how that decision triggered 5x growth
• The "brick wall moment" when all 11 employees told Scott they were looking for other jobs — and what it took to rebuild
• Why the Value Acceleration Methodology applies whether an owner is 25 or 72, planning to exit or not
• How EPI's new DriveValue.com platform meets business owners where they are — before they're ready for an advisor
• What's different about the 2026 CEPA Summit in Nashville — including a festival-style exploration experience across seven live stages

Resources Mentioned

• Exit Planning Institute — professional home for CEPAs; credential info at earnCEPA.com
• DriveValue.com — EPI's business owner-facing platform built around the Value Acceleration Methodology
• Exit Planning Summit — annual conference for exit planning professionals
• Walking to Destiny by Chris Snider — the foundational book on the Value Acceleration Methodology
• Initiative One Leadership Institute — leadership transformation program referenced in Scott's culture reset story

Connect with Scott Snider

• 🔗 LinkedIn
• 📧 [email protected]
• 🌐 exit-planning-institute.org

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Most business owners assume their CPA is doing everything possible on taxes. They aren't. And the reason isn't incompetence. It's access.

The strategies that allow 18% of Fortune 500 companies and America's wealthiest individuals to legally pay zero in federal taxes are real, documented in the tax code, and available. The problem is that most CPA firms, even highly successful ones, are stretched thin producing returns and financial statements. They don't have the time or infrastructure to find, vet, and gain confidence in the advanced strategies their highest-earning clients need most.

Alex Sonkin spent 20 years building the solution. The Due Diligence Project is the largest peer-reviewed CPA community in the country, a global network of 500+ elite CPA firms, law firms, and family offices that independently vet, rank, and rate advanced tax strategies. Think Amazon or Netflix for CPA due diligence: a centralized platform where the hard work of evaluation has already been done, so CPAs can bring vetted strategies to clients with confidence. In this episode, Paul and Alex cover how the platform works, what separates the top 1% of tax advisory CPAs from the rest, how AI is beginning to reshape the due diligence process, and the $300M+ in charitable gifts that have flowed from DDP-facilitated strategies.

About Alex Sonkin

Alex Sonkin is the founder of The Due Diligence Project™ and The Virtual Family Office (VFO) Hub™. He began his career as a professional options trader at Société Générale, making markets in S&P 500 options on the Chicago floor for nearly a decade before transitioning to help business owners access world-class tax planning. Over 20 years, he has built the Due Diligence Project into the most comprehensive independent, peer-reviewed tax strategy community in the country. He is the co-author of The Due Diligence Project with Paul McManus, available on Amazon, and has been featured in Accounting Today and Top 100 Innovators & Entrepreneurs Magazine.

What We Cover

• Why most CPA firms are leaving advanced tax strategies on the table, and why it's a structural problem, not a competence problem
• How The Due Diligence Project works as a peer-reviewed community, and why 500+ CPAs vetting a strategy produces confidence no single firm can replicate
• The "10% rule": why any business owner paying more than 10% of net income in taxes should be asking harder questions of their CPA
• How AI tools like ChatGPT and TaxGPT are being used to stress-test strategies and surface IRS risk, and where AI still falls short
• What the top 1% of CPAs are doing differently in 2026
• How DDP-facilitated strategies have generated over $300 million in charitable gifts to the Mitchell Thorpe Foundation, supporting 400+ families with critically ill children

Resources Mentioned

• The Due Diligence Project by Alex Sonkin and Paul McManus, available on Amazon
• The Mitchell Thorpe Foundation

Connect with Alex Sonkin

• Website: DueDiligenceProject.com
• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: The Due Diligence Project on LinkedIn

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When you go independent, nobody tells you that you're just trading one set of constraints for another.

When Conor Delaney went independent in 2012, he started with $40 million in AUM and a blank whiteboard. What followed was a 14-year education in becoming a CEO, a shareholder, and a leader, all while still serving clients. Today, Good Life Companies supports more than 200 advisors across the country, and the firm's advisors grew at 34% annually over the last two years, compared to an industry organic growth average of just 3%.

In this episode, Conor joins Paul and Gabe McManus to talk through the real cost of independence and the model he's built to lower that cost for advisors who are willing to make the shift. He walks through why the advisor is almost always the bottleneck in their own practice, what it actually looks like to wear the hats of advisor, CEO, and shareholder simultaneously, and how Good Life's "Front Office of the Future" is giving advisors back the seven hours a typical new client intake currently consumes.

About Conor Delaney
Conor Delaney is the founder and CEO of Good Life Companies, a Philadelphia-based platform that gives independent financial advisors the infrastructure, technology, and support to run like a firm twice their size. He started his career as a financial advisor at 19 while still a college student, and by 26 was the top advisor out of more than a thousand at his prior firm. He launched Good Life in 2012 and has grown it to support over 200 advisors managing approximately $20 billion in assets. Good Life is ranked among the 2023 Forbes list of America's Top RIAs. Conor is also a marathon runner and father of five.

What We Cover

• Why Conor's father's death at 17 became the defining motivation behind his entire career and the name "Good Life"
• The three roles every independent advisor must occupy — advisor, CEO, and shareholder — and why ignoring any one of them limits practice value
• How Good Life's "Front Office of the Future" cuts a 7-hour new client intake process down to something manageable with automation and a digital workforce
• Why COI relationships fail for most advisors (the advisor is still the bottleneck) and how Good Life executes the referral framework for them
• The 71/73/77 data: the alarming statistics on advisor divorce, health, and family relationships and what's driving it
• Why "supported independence" beats both the wirehouse model and pure independence for building enterprise value

Connect with Conor Delaney

• Website: goodlifeco.com
• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/leadinspireexecute

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