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 things in real life and love the experience, riding in that underground Senate tram car, from the office buildings to the Capitol with members of Congress, someone like me, so it leaves you starstruck. But that being said, there was a lot more politics than policy. And I think I sort of left feeling like, gosh, you got to get really lucky to enter that ecosystem and end up in a place of influence as quickly as you want to without just this perfect alignment of which party is in power.
Does the member of Congress you work for behave appropriately? Do you get picked at the right time? Does someone retire, et cetera? And so shifted towards wanting to work in business, but not really knowing what that could or should be. And so I used some professors at Duke, some family friends, some cold outreach to get conversations with a bunch of people in different areas, private equity, venture capital, running big businesses, consulting. And at the end of it, I didn't actually still know exactly what I wanted to do, but I felt dramatically better informed and had a ton of peers. This is again, while I'm in college that I think had similar indecisiveness or lack of even context on how to think about what a career in business might look like. And so I decided, hey, like maybe I can actually make a book out of this if I can get really good interviews.
And the key to that, I think, very much like entrepreneurial business, is finding points of validation.Share on X
So I happened to sit next to David Rubenstein, the Carlyle founder, at a lunch of Duke trustees that I was invited to parlayed that into getting his card, he agree to do an interview, did it the next week, no interview. I did if the book was ever that seamless in scheduling and meeting and everything else, but all of a sudden, he did it, Jamie Dimon had done it, spoke to John Mack, a bunch of others. And so, I then could use the credentials of the people that had opted in early on to convince others. And there ended up being enough there to get McMillan to publish it.
Okay, so your college experience is a little different than most, I think. Not many of us have a chance to sit down and talk to David Rubenstein. It's really impressive. Something else that you said that just called to me on a personal level is I watched House of Cards, West Wing, Madam Secretary, because I, too, was interested in governance and politics, which, of course, they go hand in hand. But having watched all those things, I'm glad I made the decision not to go that direction.
I mean, I still harbor aspirations of finding a role to have positively influenced policy, but I figured there were some other things I wanted to get done first before taking a shot at that.
I think you're on a great trajectory. Let's talk about, I'd like you to speak just for a little bit to any other young people, teenagers that are out there that are interested in entrepreneurship. You could go back or go out and talk to a 13, 14, 15-year-old. What advice would you give them?
It's interesting. I'm not that old, but the years are ratcheting up. There were very few people that went directly into traditional entrepreneurship in the early, mid 2000s. I think there are many more opportunities for students, whether it's on the sales and marketing side, whether it's on the engineering side, et cetera, or even to be a founder, you can be wildly successful.
Obviously, some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the US have been college dropouts. But I think statistically, and certainly from a learning experience, I am dramatically better as an operator having been through a couple of years at Bain & Company, having been at a large private equity investment firm, et cetera. And so, I think it's important, and many people do, this is not novel advice, but understand how long an arc most careers are. And if you have some phenomenal idea and you happen to be able to code it and run with it, like, go for that. There are more resources in undergrad and graduate schools, et cetera. Feel to make that leap immediately.
But I think without either that perfect opportunity or that amazing idea that you believe you that we obviously have to pursue, there is far more structured learning at organizations that have had the time and the resources to develop training, mentorship as part of their model, that I think you can definitely learn other ways, but it's not always gonna be clear whether you're picking up good habits or bad habits in startups. Even the best performing ones have to be quirky and cut corners to grow quickly without unlimited resources, et cetera. So number one, I think, don't feel like you have to be in a rush if you want to do entrepreneurship, to do it immediately, because I think there are a lot more folks like me out there that have taken a path where you built some skills and that allowed you to both evaluate opportunities more effectively, I think, and to have more just like raw skills and communicating, selling, et cetera.
So I would say that probably number one. And then I think two, I'm fortunate now to have the opportunity to work with people that are in their mid-20s, mid-30s, mid-40s, et cetera, especially for people that are early on. You get really to a distinguishing place in being able to execute on what I think have traditionally been the basics, like that bunch of the stuff that's in sort of the Dale Carnegie, how to influence people, et cetera, type of thing, like show up on time or early, be responsive, think about how what you're doing can create leverage for the person that you're reporting to, respond to an email immediately and just say, received, working on it, I'll get back to you in an hour, a day, a week, whatever it may be to build that confidence that when someone asks something of you, you're going to deliver against it. I think that younger, talented individuals, like, have never been smarter or more capable, but I think they on average also sometimes,
