https://youtu.be/RbUroiKBLSs
David Snider, Founder and CEO of Harness Wealth, is driven by a mission to help clients build financial confidence while making rapid decisions with clarity through modernized, tailored advisory solutions.
We learn about David’s journey from aspiring politician to private equity professional, and ultimately to entrepreneur. He explains the RAPID Framework—Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, and Decide—a decision-making process he applies to foster collaboration and clarity within his team. He shares his insights on creating scalable solutions for complex financial and tax challenges, emphasizing the importance of empowering clients with tailored tools and resources. He also highlights the value of peer advisory groups and continuous learning to navigate leadership challenges effectively.
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David Snider on Making RAPID decisions
Welcome to the Management Blueprint Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Krista, the Vistage Chair, an Adjunct Professor, and someone who just really believes in leaders. My guest today is David Snider, the founder and CEO at Harness Wealth, with a mission to help clients build confidence in the path to their best financial futures. David, welcome.
Thank you.
We're going to dig in and we're going to start on the inside in terms of you and your leadership. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it?
Well, first, thank you for having me. I would say that there are some fellow founders that I know where they really couldn't work for anyone else. Like it is in their ethos to do their own thing. And I've never totally been that way. I think early on I've done things that in retrospect were entrepreneurial, but they've generally come from an awareness of there's something that could be better. And if I can't find the solution for it, like why not just go out and build it myself? And so that was the catalyst for writing a business book that I started during college because I was looking for the resource, couldn't find it and decided to be a great Trojan horse to have conversation with people that I thought I might actually want to work with, or work for, I should say.
I think similarly here, where after the great entrepreneurial experience of helping to build Compass from pre-revenue to hundreds of millions, was open to jumping into another operating executive role. But as I was sort of thinking about the ecosystem, there's sort of the confluence of two things. Number one, despite having been a CFO and investor, every 6 months I'd find things that I had missed or screwed up and that was no more poignantly and painfully illustrated than turning to some Harvard Business School professors for what amounted to, they didn't consider at the time to be tax advice and getting the answer, which maybe philosophically could have been right, but mechanically ended up being a seven-figure mistake for me and some others.
And so, the combination of those pieces and sort of the theme that we had stumbled into a compass of the value and creating technology to help advisors and spaces that clients are really excited to get great advice and be better, be modernized, et cetera, was on that I got excited about. And so, harnesses meeting, hopefully, the need that I found around some of the nuances of tax and financial advisory and been very glad that it seems to have been helpful to thousands of others now.
Yes, that evidence is by the fact that there are thousands using it. So you brought up writing a book when you were 20. Why don't you share that title with us and how that came about?
Sure. So the book is called Moneymakers: Inside the New World of Finance and Business. And the catalyst was when I was much younger. And sorry if I'm jumping ahead to a question you often ask. In my teens, I really thought that I wanted to work on Capitol Hill, sort of had that goal of being an elected member of Congress potentially. And I was very fortunate to get an internship and get to see ...