Eric Arnold didn't learn the word "entrepreneur" until he was 19 years old. Despite this, Eric has been an entrepreneur his entire life — long before he was Planswell’s founder and CEO.
While his family wasn't exactly destitute, financial stress was a constant companion. Eric recalls, for example, knowing exactly when grocery day was every two weeks because the cupboards would look bare in the days leading up to it.
And so, Eric was always looking for ways to make a little extra money.When he was 10, Eric got a paper route. "It was terrible," he recalls, thinking of the hours and the pay. However, when offered the opportunity to sell coupon books instead, he jumped at the chance. For every booklet he sold for $5, he would get to keep $3 — a much better deal as far as he was concerned.
A few years later, his neighbor saw him sealing his driveway.
"Where did you get that bucket of sealant?" the neighbor asked.
"Home Depot," Eric replied. "Why?"
"You probably spent $20 on it," the neighbor speculated. Eric nodded. "I could have gotten you one for $5."
The next weekend, Eric and a team of eight other neighborhood kids were knocking on every door they could to sell their driveway sealing services.
In college, Eric was still the same entrepreneur he was at 10, always looking for ways to make some extra money. Thinking back to his days as a driveway sealant salesman, he started a business selling window cleaning services door to door.
It was a wild success.
After just one year of working, Eric had devised a series of steps that closed window cleaning clients at a whopping 95%. (In fact, he wrote an e-book outlining his transferable strategy, which you can read for free!)
Eric didn't stay in the window cleaning game for long. Actually, he dropped out of college to start a retail tea shop in a Toronto mall.
Unfortunately, the retail tea business was not the smashing success that window cleaning was for Eric, and before long he had to abandon ship. "I was fairly unemployable," Eric recalls, but he needed to do something to make money.
He recalls hearing financial advisors made quite a lot of money, and you didn't need a college degree to get the job. And so, not long after offloading all the tea he couldn't sell, Eric found himself working at a Canadian brokerage firm, which is where the idea for Planswell was born.
When he first started at the brokerage, his boss told him to go out and get 300 clients.
"Like, this week?" Eric asked.
"No," was the response. "Over the course of your entire career."
Eric thought there was something odd about this business model. "You're telling me," he wondered to himself, "over the course of a 150-year industry, there's been no innovation whatsoever?"
The answer, it seemed, was "yes."
The wheels started turning in Eric’s entrepreneurial mind. He began to wonder if there was a better way. In the meantime, he did what financial advisors had been doing for as long as the profession had been around: he invited prospects to dinners. He sent out mailers. He did not use the internet.
Around this time, Eric and Planswell co-founder/COO Scott Wetton decided to try a thought experiment: "would people be willing to share their personal financial information over the internet in return for delivering them a free financial plan?"
It turns out they absolutely would. A problem remained, however: building financial plans for every household did not make a scalable business. Using analogue financial planning software to build plans (which is industry standard amongst financial advisors to this day) is time-consuming and, unless the client has sizable assets, simply not worth it.
So they put Planswell on the back burner. Between 2012 and 2015, Eric and Scott tried other business ideas (power refunds, music distribution, private lessons, even a weight-loss-by-hypnosis company) none of which was sustainable long term.
Throughout all of it, they couldn't shake the thought that they had a winning idea in Planswell, if only they could build the software to make it possible.
In 2016, Eric and Scott made the decision to focus on getting Planswell off the ground.
The original idea was to replace the need for financial advisors through the use of an automated financial planning software that would instantly build plans for people. What they discovered, however, was that emotions still rule human decision-making.
No amount of well-coded software is ever going to be able to replace the value of a live human holding your hand (metaphorically), really listening to you, and understanding where you came from and where you want to go.
And so, the initial business model involved a Planswell team consisting of an in-house mortgage brokerage, insurance brokerage, a robo advisor, and a huge phone team.
At this point, Planswell resembled a high-burn tech chiché. They were dependent almost entirely on external funding sources, having to raise millions of dollars and cozy up to strategic investors. It was incredibly stressful, and, ultimately, not sustainable.
In order to ensure the financial future of his company and Planswell’s ability to provide free financial planning, Eric shifted Planswell's business model.
He streamlined everything: rather than having mortgage and insurance brokers on staff, Planswell began connecting financial advisors — who worked for their own firms — with local households interested in financial planning. Rather than spending over $50,000 on office rent every month, the company went remote (just before the pandemic hit, in fact). Planswell 2.0 would be a lean, mean, financial planning machine.
The pivot turned out to be lightning in a bottle. Planswell has partnered with thousands of advisors across the United States and Canada, and delivered financial plans to hundreds of thousands of households.
And they’re just getting started.
Planswell is now so much more than a place for folks to get free financial plans.
Planswell is set to roll out additional services which will allow households to meet all of their financial planning needs in one convenient platform, while providing financial advisors the tools they need to grow their businesses — tools currently not available in the market.
First on the list is an automated marketing system to augment advisors’ own outreach, which will ultimately get more people using professional financial planning services.
Next is the rollout of a one-stop-shop for all things personal finance. Soon, clients will be able to buy everything from insurance to solar panels directly from the platform. This will allow advisors to expand their service offerings beyond the scope of what a single financial advisor might be able to manage on their own.
Planswell is truly transforming the way financial advisors do business and the way the end-client secures their future, and that was the dream all along.