
The Intentional Investor #26: Danika Waddell
Epsilon Theory Podcast
From Classroom to Career: A Journey in Financial Planning
This chapter details the speaker's unexpected discovery of psychology during college and its influence on their career path. After a brief experience as a high school math teacher, they explore the transition to financial advisory, highlighting the importance of education in both fields. The discussion reflects on personal growth, challenges in authority, and the shift towards meaningful work in the fast-paced Seattle startup scene.
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Speaker 2
Off the shelf. Customize. Customize the way they want it. Maybe a little glue layer, maybe a data lake, maybe some fancy pant stuff on the side, but fundamentally off the shelf. The system,
Speaker 1
the core system is off the shelf. You look at multi-family. Multi-family is a much more established industry than single family. A lot of that stuff
Speaker 2
is off the shelf. You make a very good question. That's a point worth asking. Where is Graystar's tech R&D budget? Right.
Speaker 1
If some Graystar execs want to go build a great tech product, they're probably going to build the next platform system,
Speaker 2
not a platform system for Graystar. They would only benefit them. That would only benefit
Speaker 1
them. There's just a bigger market for people that want to buy technology than the captive market that you have.
Speaker 2
As you said before, this money coming in is competing against everybody. It is the free market in action. It is the SMB benefiting from the public equity markets, putting money to fund competition that ultimately drives efficiencies for Main Street. That's beautiful. But it also means that it's downward pressure on all segments. It's fueling a reversion to the mean and to the baseline, which requires a continued R&D investment back. It does seem like a challenging circumstance. Obviously, let's be real through some level of bias here. I'm selling a solution where I'm hell-bent on equipping small businesses to harvest as much of the technology leverage as they possibly can. What's notable to me is that when I think about what activities, what mindsets, what factors correlate to that outcome, at this point, it's not the tech. The tech's there. The tech is there ready to be used. It is the will to get your hands dirty. It's the will to embrace a re-architecture and a re-relating to what the work is. Is property management a series of one-off individual tasks that are executed to perform a service? Or is property management a conceptualization and understanding of the nature of both the customer, of the asset, and of the workflows that result in delivering value and architecting the rails upon which workflows through the organization? That's what I would argue. If that's the job of property management, and if the upcoming wave of folks coming into the industry are embracing both that vision as well as the practical front-line skills, I'll just use Zapier because I think it's such a great example. Zapier is so obviously so powerful, and yet it is overwhelming. In general, it can be overwhelming, but it's especially overwhelming if you don't think that's your job. If you think that your job is doing property management in a way that doesn't include that, that would just downright piss somebody off to be told that they need to go start building Zapier. If, by contrast, you believe that your job is architecting the way the work is done, that's reasonable. That's an ask. That's a conversation. That's an opportunity. It's leveraged to be harvested. Part of the conversation we're having here is when we think about the trajectory, when we think about the future, is it more or less likely that the next generation coming in, the next generation leading, the next generation on the front lines, is going to be more minimal attack? Because right now there's a lot of folks saying, it's not for me. I'm overwhelmed. The follow-up question is, what does that mean? Does that mean it's not for you? Does that mean that you can't benefit? Or does that mean that you simply have a specialized skill set in your business that you need somebody else to know how to do? And how many other functions of your business does that already exist? Matthew, I'm not technical. I couldn't code my way out of a paper bag. That has no bearing on the level of importance and significance and investment that we make in that function of our business. I'm monologuing now. That's my sensibilities about it. I agree.
Speaker 1
If you start talking to larger multifamily operators, a lot of them have a CTO. And you're like, what do you need a CTO and a property management company for? Well, you need the right person to put
Speaker 2
together the right tech stack.
Join host Matt Zeigler as he interviews Danika Waddell, founder of Xena Financial Planning, in this engaging conversation about career pivots, financial independence, and creating a more inclusive financial services industry. Danika shares her journey from accounting to launching her own financial planning firm during the pandemic, and how her personal experiences shaped her mission to help women in tech achieve financial independence.