Guillaume Decalf | Oui Financial

Josh Hile: Hello, welcome to another podcast for The Advisor View. I’m Josh Hile, the CEO of Citizen Mint, and I have Gui of We Financial.

Guillaume Decalf: You can say G.

Josh Hile: G of We Financial with us today. And so, G, sorry, give us a little bit about your background and the story behind it.

Guillaume Decalf: Yes, so I actually started my career as a financial advisor not that long ago, in 2018. And before that, I was in tech. So I was actually a project manager. I’ve been a project manager before that for 20 years in small companies like Amazon, Fitbits, I joined Fitbit when it was a startup with 300 people, and when I left, it was like 2,000 people, and then they got acquired by Google. So, and in France, I’m from France, obviously, as you can tell from my name and my accent. I’m from Northern France, and I worked 10 years in Paris when I was a consultant, and I used to actually reorganize companies. So my background is in reorganization of companies, optimization of processes and things like that. And so, 20 years being in tech, I was a little tired. I wanted to do something else, you know, maybe it was my midlife crisis, I don’t know. But at early 40s, I was like, I’m 48, I was like, okay, what do I want to do in the next 20 years of my life? And I wanted to help people. and I like personal finances. And so I passed some certifications and I started my firm at that time working with French people and French American families in the US, all over the US. We financial, OUI Financial is in 30 states, more than 30 states now. So we the go-to financial firm for French people and French American families in the US. And, Last year I decided to create a group called the WE Financial Group, W-E Financial Group, with a lot of brands in it. So we kind of like the— we’re not an aggregator now, meaning like we’re not like the, I don’t know, Carson or something like that. We don’t do only the infrastructure, we have multiple brands when we do also the marketing and everything. And it’s probably of the same group. So we share the same infrastructure, but we have different brands for underserved community. For example, French people with OUI Financial. We also have, we also have a brand for therapists with Financial Therapists. We have a brand for people with ADHD with Financial Focus. We have a brand that is linked to somehow citizenment a little bit. It’s called We Financial Impact. For nonprofits, uh, it’s pro bono work, um, it’s, uh, low-income families, financial literacy, everything that’s, uh, that doesn’t make us money basically because we do most of in this— in that branch we do most of the thing, uh, pro bono. And we have WE Financial, W-E Financial, when it’s more like for people wanting to borrow. And that’s going to be linked also to Citizen Mint, and I will tell you why uh, after, wants to borrow against their investments. So instead of selling, they have a concentrated position in one stock, or they have a portfolio that have been doing well and they have a lot of capital gain and they want to invest in something else, like CitizenMe, for example. Instead of selling their investments, we’re gonna borrow against it. And it sounds like a security-based loan, But it’s not, it’s actually something else that is pretty new and it’s at 4% interest rates and it’s tax deductible as capital loss. So it’s called box spread. And we, we have a branch of the WeFinancial group that is specialized in that. Uh, and we use it with our clients, uh, and, uh, to invest in citizen, in citizen mints. And I will explain the, the, the system, uh, a little bit later, but that’s, uh, so basically we, um, We’re growing pretty fast. We manage about $160 million in assets that we manage directly. Actually, we have a lot more that we don’t like, for example, for clients with Citizen Mint, we have millions of dollars and I don’t count that in AUM because we don’t bill on that. But what we bill on is $160 million. And I was at $100 million in end of 2024. I hired 5 people in 2025. I know in 2026 we’re growing fast. Yeah, that’s the situation right now.

Josh Hile: So where do you see most of your growth coming from? Like, that’s a lot and a lot of things growing at one point in time. So is there one specific area? Is it online marketing? Is it referrals? Is it somewhere else?

Guillaume Decalf: Oh, in terms of— so actually, and we’re working on it in 2026, it’s not referrals that much. It’s more and more, but I was so busy when I was by myself, I was so busy even without referrals that I didn’t need to work on asking my clients for referrals. But we’re working on that. We’re working on being more thoughtful about telling the clients, telling our clients like, hey, you like the work we’re doing with you, help other people.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: Bring them to us and we can help them. And we have also a different, like we do hourly financial planning on top of AUM planning, so, and financial planning. So we have a lot of clients that just come for 2 or 3 hours and we create a comprehensive financial plan and then they do their investment by themselves. And then sometimes 2 or 3 years after they come back to us and say, oh yeah, I totally screwed up. I went out of the market, I didn’t go back in, I don’t know what I’m doing, help us. So usually it’s how it works, but we have hourly and we have AUM. And so it’s mainly marketing. We do a lot of webinars and the webinars are in French and in English. In our French webinars, we have about 500 to 600 people signing up.

Josh Hile: So it’s— Oh, wow.

Guillaume Decalf: That’s a lot. Yeah.

Josh Hile: That’s incredible. Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: That’s really good. Yeah.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: And so every month we have 500, 600 people signing up at the about 150 coming live and the others use the replay. And so we cover like, we have once a month. So we’re like, we talk to, or actually probably 5,000 or 6,000 people see us every year. It’s a lot. And so that’s why we’re growing so fast and how do we do that? We have a database of French people in the US. We can identify, have a marketing person that can identify French people in the US and we send them the webinar. They’re free. They’re really detailed. They’re 1.5 to 2 hours. And it does two things. First, it helps us, it helps people knowing us. Two, it filters It filters them. Like people who just have a few questions, we don’t want them to spend an hour with us. We’ll answer the question for free. And if they have a more complex need, then they can work with us. And that’s one of the problems I see with financial advisors sometimes is they try to get as many people. That’s not what we’re doing. We try to filter as much as we can like that. People who are actually, we spend time with, they really need us.

Josh Hile: And is there a specific demographic beyond French? Is there a specific demographic that your clients fall into? Is it mid-career? Is it later in their career? Is there something?

Guillaume Decalf: No, it’s 30 to 60-year-old or 65-year-old. For OUI Financial, it’s French people. For other brands, it’s pretty much anyone. It’s mainly, you know, people in their 30s, they’re not, they’re like beginning of the career. They feel like they’re busy with their job and things like that. They don’t think financial planning that much. People in their 50s, mid-40s, early 50s, they’re like, they’re getting worried about their retirements. And they have kids and they want to, um, plan for colleges and stuff like that, that’s when they call us.

Josh Hile: Got it.

Guillaume Decalf: So most of them are like 40s, between 40 to 50, but we have— the youngest is probably 25 and the oldest is 65, 70. Yeah, probably. But most of the Most of them are 40 to 50, and most of them— so what we do in terms of asset under management is we use Seeds Investor because we can invest with people values. Yeah, because for most of our clients, 80% of our clients, when we give them the questionnaire, the the investment questionnaire, they want to put their values in. Whether it’s like environment, the most common one, but there are so many more. Like we can, we have environments like integrity, all this stuff. And we also, they can exclude also like, I don’t know, defense stocks, oil and gas and things like that. And so a lot of our clients, Again, 70 to 80% of people have some kind of— have some values that they want to implement. And so one of the challenges that we had at some point is it’s pretty common to be able to exclude things and add values when it comes to stocks. It’s a lot harder when it comes to non-traditional assets. And so, when it comes to real estate, I don’t know, infrastructure, things like that, it was really hard to find something that’s, you know, like when we talk infrastructure, say, hey, do you want to invest in a pipeline? No, not for my clients. Usually not for my clients. And so, so that was one of the challenge a few years ago. It’s still a challenge. I mean, again, with Citizen Mint, it’s easier, but I think it’s pretty, it sounds like pretty niche, but actually it’s not.

Josh Hile: No, it’s not.

Guillaume Decalf: Because one of the value proposition for my clients is that, is, hey, investing with an impact is important for you. The stock market is not the only place you can do that.

Josh Hile: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, maybe you can talk about just how, um, like, well, and I know you have a lot of different brands, but OUI Financial approaches wealth management differently, and also kind of how your international perspective shapes how you kind of think about wealth and lifestyle.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, we financial— OUI Financial is still the core of, of the group, you know, because it’s the oldest brand, and so it’s still where most of our clients are. So how do we, how do we approach like international planning?

Josh Hile: How do you see you approach wealth management differently? And maybe how does your international perspective— obviously having an international perspective is very different than having just a US perspective— do you think that plays into how you approach wealth management differently or not?

Guillaume Decalf: I don’t know if it’s— so yes, for sure, it does, does change our perspective. I think two things are shaping the way we invest or the way we, or the way we approach, whether it’s investments or financial planning. Uh, the first one is my background in tech. So in general, I’m an early adopter when it comes to investment, a new type of investment. I do my due diligence, things like that. But like, for example, this box spread, I was, uh, I was explaining this possibility of borrowing money to invest in something else. Well, let’s talk about it.

Josh Hile: Tell me about that. Tell me about how box spread works.

Guillaume Decalf: So, so, um, Basically, it’s something that exists since the ’80s, but it used to be done for people with tens of millions of dollars, like really rich people. And you had to call the stock exchange, say, hey, I want to set up a box spread. So it’s based on options, based on the S&P 500. It can be based on anything. The way we do it is based on the S&P 500. So it’s like options, so it’s derivative, it’s complicated, you need to be specialized in it. And so before it was automated, 2 years ago, you had to call, and so people answering the phone, they didn’t care if you had like $1 million or $2 million, it’s nothing for them. They need tens of millions of dollars to do it, to even bother to do it. But now they Everything goes through a new system that is automated. So it dropped— it democratized this possibility. And so it’s not very common, but I think it’s going to grow like crazy in the next 3 to 5 years. Everyone’s going to do it. Why? Because as I said, it’s like borrowing against your portfolio, except that’s not borrowing. You create position on the market. And, uh, via options, and you have different legs, different line of options, and they all somehow cancel each other. So whether the stock market goes up or goes down, it doesn’t change anything because it cancels each other. But the difference of all this cancellation is 4%, and that’s what you pay, um, someone else who’s on the other side of the trade You pay this 4% to him or her, and, uh, this 4%, because it’s positioned on the market, doesn’t impact your credit score. Um, it’s considered capital loss. So, uh, you do a box spread and the interest is $40,000 a year. This $40,000 is a loss. You have a gain wherever the gain is, as long as it’s considered capital gain. $40,000 $40,000 of loss, it cancels each other. You don’t pay taxes. So it’s 4% before taxes. And, um, because it’s not like a loan, it doesn’t answer the same criteria. It doesn’t— it’s not considered a loan for anything, for credit score or for anything. I said that it’s a loan because it’s easier to explain to clients, but it’s actually not really a loan. There are some risks, like your portfolio cannot drop. It’s like a security-based loan. You cannot owe more than— you cannot have— you cannot owe more than what you have. So that means if you borrow $600,000 on a $1 million portfolio, portfolio cannot drop more than 25%. But that’s my job to manage the risk. Yeah.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: So So we use it for a lot of different things. We, uh, and my international perspective to, uh, go to your question, buying a property in France, you can go through a bank, not a US bank, you have to go through a French bank. Really hard, really complicated, really, um, document heavy. Um, takes like 3 to 4 months just to have a loan. I mean, it’s a mess. Um, And so by doing a box spread, we have a $1 million portfolio, we borrow $600,000. With those $600,000, we can buy whatever we want. Property in France, property in the US, other investment not linked to the stock market. So for some clients, we do that. They say, hey, I want to diversify my assets. I want to buy real estate. I want to buy something different. Uh, infrastructure project, real estate, things like that. Um, and for them, we’re like, hey, do not sell, do not sell money from your portfolio. Keep the $1 million and it’s going to grow. Borrow $200,000. And as long as this $200,000 do more than 4%, that’s what you get. Yeah.

Josh Hile: And how long does it last for? The box spread.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah. I’ll finish my thought and then we’ll talk about that. And so those $200,000, we’ll take them and we invest in projects, like in projects in CZ and Mins, and they get you like 6, 7, 10, 20%. And then you still have your $1 million portfolio, your $200,000, they still, they exist in two places. One in $200,000 goes up with the stock market or down. And then the $200,000 goes up, this isn’t it. It’s not LINK. So that’s why it’s great. Um, so those positions, and there are multiple ways to do it, but basically you can borrow up to 5 years. You don’t— you— so there’s 2 weird things with the bug spread. One is you don’t pay monthly, you pay once a year or once after the 5 years. So you borrow, for example, You borrow $500,000 on 5 years at 4%. It’s fixed, it will be 4%. You don’t pay anything for 5 years. And at the end of those 5 years, you owe $100,000. But 20%, 5 years at 4%, 20%, $100,000. And you pay, uh, then you don’t have to pay the principal. You can renew it. And that’s actually what we do with clients. We keep renewing it forever. And there are reasons for that. Or you can pay anytime you want, pretty much. Got it. You do what you want. It’s super flexible.

Josh Hile: And then—

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah. Oh, go ahead.

Josh Hile: Well, I was just going to say, does it cap your upside at all on your underlying positions?

Guillaume Decalf: No.

Josh Hile: Okay.

Guillaume Decalf: No, it doesn’t cap your upside, but again, you have to be careful with the risk. ‘Cause if you borrow 60% of your portfolio and you’re 100% in the S&P 500, for example, then it can drop 30% and then you will have a margin call. Schwab will tell you, ’cause we do it with Schwab, Schwab will tell you, hey, you have to sell some position, you’re too close to those $600,000 that you owe. Worst case scenario, they sell it for you. So they sell everything and you had $650,000 all in cash. Yeah. But you, you didn’t lose anything because this $600,000 already exists somewhere else. They still exist. The only thing is that instead of selling today, removing it from the stock market and buying something, you don’t sell it. We just give you the money. We give you the cash and you, you invest it. And so The money still exists at two places and that’s what it’s weird for people and for financial advisor too. Like what? Uh, but, um, they exist in two places. So, um, so we are very, very careful at WeFinancial about the risk. Like we don’t even get close to, uh, get a margin call.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Just super conservative on how much you’re—

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah. We should, but we need to have the right balance to still make money more than 4%. Yeah, we’re not taking too much risk. That’s why I talk about 60%, because usually it’s 60 to 70% max that we can— we can leverage, we can borrow 85%, but if you borrow 85% of your portfolio, portfolio cannot drop more than 5%. Yeah, it’s impossible. So, um, that’s why 60% is a sweet spot usually, or under. We can go up to 70% sometimes. But, uh, what’s great is, for example, what we do with Citizen Mint and some of our clients is we borrow money. The project goes— Citizen Mint project, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Yep.

Guillaume Decalf: Citizen Mint reimburse the, uh, pay back everything.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: Well, we put a little bit more money in the portfolio. We keep some money in Citizen Mint that continues to grow. We reinvest, we put some money in the portfolio and just the portfolio went up, particularly this past 2 years when the market went up. Yeah. Beginning of the year went up a lot. On top of that, we put more money. So we started at 60% leverage. 2 years after we had like 40%. Yeah. You know, so with time we keep the same amount, but the portfolio grows, uh, more and more. And that’s why we usually don’t even bother pay back the loan. What I call the loan, the box spread, because with time, with time it becomes negligible, becomes so small. And what’s great is with a client say, well, what happened? Well, what, we don’t reimburse the loan? Like, no, but what happened when you die? That’s the beauty of it. Not that you die, but that is what happened when you die. There’s a step-up basis when you die. So Instead, let’s imagine, let’s take two scenarios. First scenario, just you get old, you want to reimburse this loan, this box spread, you’re going to sell some stock or some of your investments and you’re going to reimburse it. You’re going to pay taxes on the gain you made on those investments. Okay? But if you die, here’s what happens. There’s a step-up basis. All the gain when you die, are not taxable when it goes to your kids. So you have a $1 million portfolio, you have $500,000 of gain, your kids will get the $1 million. Yeah, there will be no tax. So what happened with the box spread is there’s no gain. You, um, the estate sell part of it to, uh, pay for the box spread. There’s no No taxes here and the box spread is paid. Wow. Abracadabra. Yeah. I take the taxes, abracadabra, disappear. So a lot of things can happen in the next 5, 10, 20 years. So, but as of today, it’s how it works. As of today, it’s how it works. And again, it’s not very— box spread is not very common, but it’s getting, it’s getting there. And we use a specialized company called SyntheticFi that are— they do only that. SyntheticFi does only box spread. That’s all they do. They specialize in that. Our job is to manage the portfolio. They don’t do that, but they— we ask them, hey, we want to, uh, borrow $500K. They will do the box spread, $500K. I will give it to the client in cash. It takes 2 weeks to put in place the possibility to get a bug spread. It’s free, just we add the option level in a portfolio, and then 24 hours to get the money. Wow, it’s really fast. And there’s no— there’s 2 forms to sign at the beginning, and then you get the money like that. Wow, 24 hours. That’s, that’s an amazing, amazing products. And so we use it a lot to do like things instead of selling. We can diversify, we can do that with some people who have like, uh, we have some clients who have huge position in one stock and they don’t want to sell because of capital gains and everything. So we borrow against it when, when we can. It’s not always the case, yeah, but when we can, we’re going to do that. And it’s not boring. I say boring Yeah, because it’s easy, but it’s actually not boring. Yeah, it’s different.

Josh Hile: No, I get it. That’s amazing. That’s a, that’s a great value add to your clients and something that creates real tangible value, like from a tax perspective. Um, and what do you like— and maybe this is what they value most is paying less taxes, but what do you think clients value most today? What’s, what’s kind of like, you know, the thing that you kind of provide value from that?

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, so that’s interesting because, uh, that’s a good question. Because part of our reflection on where the group is going and what we want to do with the WE Financial Group and how we want to serve our clients, we, we started to talk to them to give, for them to give us feedback. What we do well, what we don’t do well, what we can improve, things like that. They didn’t talk at all about performance. None of them.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: Even if we’ve been doing great performance.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: They didn’t talk about performance at all. They talk a little bit about, hey, you help us save taxes, but not that much. What they talk about is values, peace of mind, how we give them peace of mind, and the fact that we at the forefront of what exists. Like, when there’s a product and that’s a good product and, um, it has some value— not values, but value. Yeah. And so that’s the case for the bug spread. We also have, um, something called ETF 351. It’s also another type of thing that we do we can talk about it another time. Citizen Mini is part of it. You know, when we met Josh, I was like, yeah, it’s good, et cetera. I was pretty small. And then we talked again a couple of years after, and I was like, wait a second, absolutely, that’s great. Yeah, we gotta use that. And to my knowledge, You were the first I heard doing like infrastructure with an impact.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: You know? And so, um, to me this is new. This is not something I, I hear about it, but it’s not, it’s more linked to the stock market.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: It was not about infrastructure. It was not about like real estate. It was not about that. And so I thought that was a, a niche that is actually not a niche. Yeah, actually the proof is that we have hundreds of clients, 80% of them wants to have an impact. They just don’t know it exists. They just don’t know it’s possible.

Josh Hile: Yeah, no, and I think that’s true. I think it’s also like, I mean, even when we were starting out, um, people would call us niche and I was like, infrastructure is the biggest part of the market, like investing in energy and all these things that are— I mean, now it’s kind of like everybody’s talking about infrastructure and the need for energy.

Guillaume Decalf: Yes.

Josh Hile: It’s like a huge topic. But like 2 years ago, nobody even discussed it. Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: When you— and when we met, like, I think that was 4 or 5 years ago, it was just— it was mainly like oil and gas and pipeline and stuff like that. You know, it was not— it was not like data center or solar panel or things like that. You know, and I think it’s just the— what’s crazy, it’s that I think it’s just the beginning. Despite the political climate against, um, against this type of projects, I think it’s, it’s still, it’s, it’s still gonna happen. There’s no other choice. Like solar panel, for example, is cheaper than petrol right now because of the iron ore. And you like cheaper than China?

Josh Hile: Yeah, which is crazy.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah. And so economically it makes sense.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: But still, philosophically, people are against it. But at the end, the economics are— that’s what’s going to— it may take years, but that’s what’s going to happen. The economics will work in the renewable energy favor. It may take years, pushback and everything, but I’m quite sure it’s going to work.

Josh Hile: I think it’s happening. I mean, honestly, Texas is about to pass California as the biggest renewable energy state, which will surprise everybody. But here’s a chart This is, this is live real time from ERCOT, which is Texas’s power authority. And this shows their real time fuel mix. So they’re getting 54% of their current generation of energy from solar, 8% from wind. So you’re looking at 61% from just renewables. And it’s going up significantly given Texas’s geography, which is like West Texas is Why? There’s nothing— you can put a lot of solar panels there with a lot of— so, and then you’re looking at power storage is also, you know, going to be going up, uh, and natural gas is a very small portion of their overall energy mix. So it’s, it’s kind of crazy looking at that.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, and it’s, it’s not, you know, we— it’s happening in front of us, but We start hearing about it, but it’s not obvious for everyone. Yeah. Like when you hear like drill baby drill, like sure, go for it. Like it’s not going to work. Yeah.

Josh Hile: Yeah. It’s like, yeah, for certain things, but you know, most of the power is really going to come from solar, wind, and with batteries as part of that, just because of that aspects of it, with solar probably being the biggest one.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, there’s— that’s, to me, that’s, that’s obvious. But the— what I think we underestimated in the past 10 years— I mean, we overestimated— some people overestimated, some people underestimated. Like, uh, they thought it will— some people thought it would go faster.

Josh Hile: Yes.

Guillaume Decalf: And it went slower. But I think I think people underestimated, like they thought it will be like the first 5 years, it will go super fast. It went slow. And they said, oh, because it went slow, it will continue to go slow, but it’s actually going exponential. Like you show it with Texas, it’s going faster and faster. So I think they overestimated at the beginning that it will be fast. And that’s why we had, like, I remember like 6 or 7 years ago, A lot of clients were saying, oh yeah, I want to buy an ETF on solar panels and everything. It crashed completely. It was horrible. And then the past 3 or 4 years, they went up and everything goes up and all the projects. And yeah, so I think it’s accelerating despite, again, despite the political climate here in the US.

Josh Hile: Exactly. And the economics of that. How do you think about how you go to clients’ portfolios? Like, how do you size it appropriately within their portfolios? How do you think about liquidity? What’s important to your clients there?

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, so two things. There are a couple of things that are important for my clients, and that’s one of the reasons why they don’t go to infrastructure that much, or as much as I would like them to go. That’s because the entry ticket can be pretty high for some of my clients, like $100,000 or more. And also the liquidity factor. So it’s blocked 3 to 5 years. A lot of things can happen in 3 to 5 years. We saw it this past couple of years. And so, so that’s one of the things that they’re scared of. It’s, oh, I’m going to block my money into something that is still not liquid, more and more transparent, but the project you propose are pretty transparent. We can go like in a lot of details, but it’s not the case for a lot of projects in infrastructure. Some of them, it’s like pretty vague. Like some of my clients say, oh yeah, I read this thing, or I received an email about this infrastructure project. And I go into the details and there’s nothing. Is this like wishful thinking? Oh yeah, like last time it was like real estate in Hawaii, and there was like fine print, well, the project hasn’t been accepted yet because there was a special authorization because it’s on the land that is important for people in Hawaii, and so I’m like, oh ho ho, now that’s dangerous. That can take years to be approved, if approved at all. Exactly. It’s buried. And so, and thanks to AI, actually, you know, you can put the 90-page document or the 50-page document in AI and say, look for this type of thing.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: And then it can give you the page and then you have to do your due diligence and look at it, but they can save you a lot of time on that. And so a lot of projects like that. A lot of things like wishful thinking. Oh yeah, if everything goes as planned, it’s going to be like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Hile: And yeah, that’s the main thing for us is transparency and trying to be like, here’s what you’re actually investing in and like discuss it in detail. And it’s like, if you need more information, listen.

Guillaume Decalf: Oh, the sound is pretty bad suddenly. It cuts, uh, I cannot hear you anymore.

Josh Hile: Can you hear me now?

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, it’s a little saturated, but I can hear you.

Josh Hile: Um, actually, a second, sure. But, um, alternatives, is it like 2 to 5% of their portfolio?

Guillaume Decalf: Oh, uh, no, we go up to— so there’s 3 types of alternatives that we use. Okay. There’s liquid alternatives, mutual funds. And when I say that, can be gold, silver, that can be long-short equity and things like that. So that we can go up on the portfolio depending on the level of risk. It goes from 20% to 50% of the portfolio. In what we call alternative, because bonds, we don’t like them very much. We didn’t like them in 2022, we still don’t like them. And so, so we use, we use more liquid alternatives in the portfolio. And then there’s alternative outside of traditional assets, so a lot less liquid. And we have two of them. And because I work a lot with French people, they love real estate. French people and real estate is a love story because in France, building your net worth is buying properties, which is great in France, not so great outside of France. And so the two things that we have And it goes from 5 to, I mean, it depends what, but 20% of their, but not in one thing, you know, it’s always multiple things. So for example, Citizen Mint has different projects, we’ll put like 3 to 5% in one project. Like we have a client, she has like 4 or 5 projects with you guys. And it’s like 5, 10%, it’s 5% for each project. So total is 25%. Of net worth, but it’s a bunch of different projects.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: So, um, and because she’s really— impact is really important for her and she really doesn’t trust the stock market. Yeah. And so, um, so it’s an extreme, uh, most of the people it’s, um, 5 to 10% in Citizen Mint, 5 to 10% in something, uh, that we have. We have a funding, um, We Financial at a company called person.com. It’s private credit.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: So you lend money to small businesses and, uh, and usually it’s 5 to 10%. Yeah.

Josh Hile: Okay, now that makes total sense.

Guillaume Decalf: But in terms of taxes, it’s considered revenue. So the return is pretty good, but it’s considered revenue. While Citizen Mint, depending— and that’s You have to deep dive on the project a little bit because, uh, most of the time it’s capital gain. So I like that, I like it. Or what I love is those projects when that you have and when they actually refund you the capital at the beginning, so there’s no taxes and you get money and there’s no taxes.

Josh Hile: And if our distribution is offset by accelerated depreciation, that’s what we like.

Guillaume Decalf: Yes. It is awesome. Those projects are really good. And so I try to explain to the clients and they’re like, what? Like, yeah, it’s like they reimburse what you put, but then—

Josh Hile: The 1860s return what you made.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah, that’s the best one. Yes.

Josh Hile: Yeah, I know those are unique and differentiated and pretty amazing.

Guillaume Decalf: And that reduces the risk like right away because you get your money back in 1 or 2 years. And then whatever is left is good, but you already get your capital back.

Josh Hile: Yeah, exactly. It’s really reducing the risk for clients. And also it’s just like we’re usually first lien on a lot of those projects, so it’s pretty awesome.

Guillaume Decalf: That’s really cool. Yeah, those are pretty good projects.

Josh Hile: So shifting gears, what’s, um, how are you thinking about AI and how that’s going to change the environment for wealth advisors? And yeah, thinking about utilizing it as well?

Guillaume Decalf: Oh man, that’s a huge subject. We can do a whole podcast on that. Um, yeah, so I love AI in some ways and I hate it in other ways, like a lot of people. And like every tool, there is a good side and a bad side. Okay, so, uh, the good side For us financial advisor, of— so I’m gonna talk about financial advisor in general and particularly for my firm. So for financial advisor in general, it saves a lot of time, a lot of time, like emails, etc. I draft an email with a bunch of ideas and I ask the AI to put in structure for my clients. So it’s still my ideas, and I use AI not to generate ideas, but to put them in a structured way and in a nice way. And so it takes me like 5, 10 minutes to write a bunch of ideas, and then it gives me a nice email.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Right.

Guillaume Decalf: And so, so that’s, that’s, that saves me a lot of time. Analyzing documents, really good at it as long as you ask, because there’s less and less. But when I started using it, there were a lot of hallucinations. Like they will say, oh yeah, it says that. And I’m like, hmm. So I learned to ask what page. And sometimes you go to the page and no, it’s not in there. So that I’m really careful with. Yeah. And but it’s less with the new versions and everything. It’s a lot less than that. I still ask for pages. So every time I send, I don’t trust AI in terms of finding the right data at the right place or interpreting the data as a financial would do yet. So I always use AI as a first pass, then I review it, then I look into the document myself, but it guides me to where to look in the documents. And then I challenge also, it gives me a way to challenge. Like I say, hey, you say that, but I disagree because of this and this and that. And I try to, and then it gives me like, when I do my due diligence on projects, I do this. So it’s not AI reviewing the document in a sense, it’s like more of an exploration. Okay, what this, what that, where it goes, et cetera. Then about investments, it’s getting better. So that’s, so how does it impact my firm? Like, oh shit, we’re gonna— pardon my French— we’re gonna be replaced by AI. And I know it’s not gonna be the case for my firm. All the financial advisors, their value proposition is, we invest for you. They’re gonna disappear, because AI can invest pretty well already, and it’s gonna get better and better. But our clients, again, it’s not about the way we invest, it’s not about the performance, It’s about the discussion they have with us, how we interact with them, how we give them peace of mind. That’s the value of a human being. Because the problem with AI is like remove intuition. Us as human, in terms of relationship, particularly as financial advisor, we are, we work with people. And that’s what’s important. And that’s what we do in my firm with clients. We actually don’t talk about performance that much. Tell them, yeah, this is the performance. You’re not happy? Well, we can be more risky. Oh yeah, but no. Okay. Well then that’s the performance you get. And if clients say, hey, I come to you because I want the better performance, I want the performance of the S&P 500, I’m like, hey, I can guarantee you the performance of the S&P 500 and you don’t even have to pay me. Buy the S&P 500 as an ETF. You have the performance. I don’t want this. That’s not, that’s not what I’m good at. That’s not, that’s, an AI can do that. An AI can replace you on that. An AI, at least for now, cannot replace the intuition, cannot replace the way you interact with clients when they panic and the market goes down and you’re like, hey, Don’t worry, I got you. Do not panic, do not sell. We are watching it. We are doing things. And sometimes not doing anything is actually the right thing to do, most of the time.

Josh Hile: Exactly.

Guillaume Decalf: So, but you need to convince the clients. An AI cannot convince someone. We know our clients very well. And so I’m glad that AI is coming because that’s going to remove a lot of financial advisors that actually have high fees and don’t do— we see that all the time. They don’t do much with their clients. They talk to them once a year. They don’t look at their overall planning situation, financial planning situation. They just do investments. And when you look at the investments, like 4 or 5 ETFs or funds, when they get retro commissions, No, that’s not our job as financial advisor. Our job is not to manage portfolio, day-to-day manage. An AI can do that. It’s build a portfolio that will withstand different cycles of the market, but also interact with our clients and make sure that they are okay in their life. Financial advisor, we almost like therapists. Our clients tell us a lot of things, different things. And so I’m not afraid of AI. I think it’s a great tool, but I think financial advisors, some financial advisors should be afraid of it.

Josh Hile: Anything else you see happening in wealth management over the next 3 to 5 years?

Guillaume Decalf: Though AI is going to revolutionize like a lot of things.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Like hypofix, which is what you’re trying to do to a certain extent.

Guillaume Decalf: Yeah. Oh, and AI is also really bad at cross-border financial planning. Really bad. Like we test AI all the time with questions about cross-border financial planning. Really bad. It’s scary bad. And, um, yeah. And we have some clients say, well, but ‘ChatGPT told me this and this and that.’ We’re like, ‘It’s exactly the opposite. It’s totally not that.’ That’s the worst thing. And so, uh, so for now, really bad. Um, so that’s good for us.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: But, uh, yeah, it was management. I think, I hope that we more and more of firm that, um, actually don’t give high value to their clients. And when I say firm, that can be big firm, not gonna say name, but really big firm that just what they do is basic financial planning, invest in bunch of funds that is a mathematical model and that you can do with an AI, but actually don’t deep dive on the situation of their clients. Like some of the biggest firms, I mean, it’s, they paid, our clients pay like 2%. They talk to their financial advisor to review their portfolio once a year. And that’s it. We talk to our clients like at least every 3 or 4 months, sometimes every week when there is a situation when they buy a house or things like that. Yeah, like it’s not, um, and our fees is around 1%.

Josh Hile: Yeah, yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: And sometimes less. And, and we don’t get commission from, uh, how we invest. So I think there was a big trend, uh, where the fees are going down, and I think it’s going to continue to a certain extent. I think we’re almost done with that. I think that’s a small boutique firm. We had the bottom of the fees, like we cannot go down more.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Guillaume Decalf: Like it’s really hard to go down more. The way we, and again, because of my background in reorganization and everything, I dropped the cost of my, like I don’t have an admin. Almost everything is automated. And it’s not by AI. Also, I see a lot of AI as a value proposition. Hey, we’re going to implement AI for your company. No, AI is a tool. It’s not a value. Just because you’re implementing AI doesn’t mean anything. You have to use AI for something. Like, for example, for us, we’re probably going to use AI for complicated process, like our billing process is really complicated. And we’re like, takes us days, weeks, and we have to review everything, make sure everything is square and fair. And AI can help with that because it’s really hard to automate because it’s different systems interacting with each other. But other than that, I don’t— oh, to prep meetings, AI— oh no, AI can be useful and we use it for that, to review meetings with clients. Like, what did we do well? What didn’t we do well, what we can improve, like, because they have the transcripts and they can analyze a lot of things. Yeah, yeah, to make us better. We, we use AI to improve ourselves. It’s a continuous improvement.

Josh Hile: Yeah. So here’s, um, my last question, and this is, um, maybe what you’re doing right now. What is something that people don’t know about you that would surprise them?

Guillaume Decalf: Personally or—

Josh Hile: Yeah, personally. Let’s keep it personal because— or like a hobby that you have.

Guillaume Decalf: Well, a lot of that they don’t know about me. There’s probably two things they don’t know about me. One, that I used to be a martial artist. Oh, okay. For 25 years. So I did martial arts and then I switched. And the second thing is linked to that. Oh man, it’s not linked to that, but, uh, so I started martial arts when I was 14, 15, and I stopped when I was in my 40s when I had my midlife crisis, uh, and I switched, uh, and I just decided to become a runner. And, uh, the first few years— and I’ve never run before, so it’s really my 40s— I, I did a 5K and I was with a cousin who was a runner and she passed me like super easily. I was like— and she passed me, she was on the phone because it was Black Friday, was on the phone, uh, shopping. And she’s like, oh, I’ll see you, uh, later. And she went and I said, never again. I’m— something they don’t probably don’t know, but that’s kind of obvious. That’s why I’m a I’m a founder and CEO of two firms. It’s that I’m really competitive, extremely competitive. And so, um, so I, after that I said, no way, it’s never going to happen again. And so I started training, and then you get a little out of hand. Um, so, uh, I started with 5K and 10K, then I did a half marathon, then I did a trail marathon. Took me 5 hours and 40 minutes with elevation. And then I went, I did a 50K, uh, 6 weeks ago, took me 8 hours and 40, 8 hours and 40 minutes because it was 8,500 of elevation. And Friday I’m going to do this marathon in the Grand Canyon. Uh, and, uh, I know I feel like, oh, it’s only 24 miles. So it’s not a big deal. I never thought I will think like 7 hours running in the heat and will be, ah, not a, not a big deal. So, um, yeah, that’s, uh, that’s incredible.

Josh Hile: Inspiring me right now. Let’s go!

Guillaume Decalf: It’s fun. Yeah, it happens, you know, it happens out of nowhere. Like, I was like, I would never do a marathon, running for 4 hours, not my thing. Too long, I get bored. I know I’m running, but I’m running in nature, so it’s—

Josh Hile: yeah, that’s a little bit easier. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, really appreciate it. Thank you, Josh. And, um, yeah, I appreciate everything, uh, about your firm and what you’re building. Anytime.