My name is Mark Johnsen, I'm the CEO and the Chief Wealth Architect at Wealth Architects.
What prompted us to engage in the strategic planning process was the Schwab consultant I was working with said, "Have you ever thought about writing these thoughts down?" And what I recognized was it was a process I had gone through before starting the firm, and it served as a useful guide in terms of our building the company over the last decade. And so it was a real catalyst to get that vision on paper, to be able to share with the rest of the team, and to allow them to express their own thoughts and motivations about where they hoped the company would go in the future.
One of the things I've tried to do is to have our team express their thoughts about where we're going in this vision, and an exercise we did was writing a Wall Street Journal article, what would they write about our company five to 10 years on? And so seeing those articles of our team members and how they expressed what they were deeply motivated by, what they hoped our company would stand for in the future was really, really powerful. And to see that in their own words was very motivating to me as a leader, and I think it was very, hopefully, inspiring to them individually.
I think the way that I see our team incorporate this vision into their day-to-day work is that it's really just aligned our company with a deep sense of purpose of what we're trying to be in the future, and that's really helped us to, one, share stories about building wealthier lives on a weekly basis, to find the right types of associates to join our team to fulfill this mission, and, finally, is really just to align us to our big goals that we have, that we've laid out in our vision. And that clarity around those three things is just really, really powerful and important on a day to day basis in our work together.