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260: David Snider on Making RAPID decisions

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, especially if they didn’t have that professional service experience early on, can miss things that hinder their ability to be as successful, assuming that success is predicated upon working with people that have been in the workforce for a couple of decades and value stuff that traditionally has been really beneficial in business and upward mobility.

I love it. I love that you’re reinforcing that there’s continued leadership development within organizations. And for young people looking for companies to go to, look for those who are going to lift them up and nurture their path. And then you also underscore the importance of that mentorship and even stretching yourself. Doing what we do well all the time, we just stop growing. So pushing yourself to go on. So thank you. Kind of along those lines, talking about processes, you shared with me that you follow a decision-making framework with the acronym RAPID, which was you found in Matt Mochary’s The Great CEO Within, the book. So tell us about RAPID.

So I think it hits on a few different components. So RAPID stands for Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, and Decide. And it’s meant to encapsulate a few things. Number one, the person pushing for a decision can but doesn’t have to be the decision maker. The CEO can but doesn’t have to be the decision maker. But it’s also really valuable to ensure that you’ve got the right people that ought to be involved in a decision, aware of it, providing input, et cetera, to create the best outcome. So the R, recommend, is someone who’s actually indicating from the team, hey, we need to make a call on this, going to a new market, making an exception on a deal for a new customer, et cetera. And they ideally are not just recommending we make a decision, but have a proposed solution of what they think the business, the team, et cetera, should do. The agree side are those that should be like brought in and agree generally. And that can be something as structural as like legal making sure that it’s okay, or compliance if you’re a business like ours that has some regulation around it, etc. The P is perform. Like, who’s actually going to get stuff done based upon what you choose to do as a path.  I, input, so those that maybe not in the agree camp from like a required standpoint, not in the perform camp of doing the work, but they have a valuable view because they’re going to be related to the decision or they have another senior leader, et cetera, and then decide. And this is definitely not something that I do perfectly, but there is a desire in this framework that if it is not an irreversible decision, it ought to be one that the CEO does not make, because it allows the organization to be more nimble, enables people to be empowered.

We've got a company value around trying to make people empowered to make and be accountable for the decisions, so it aligns with that. Share on X

If it’s something that’s irreversible, we’re going to invest a huge amount of money to go into a new market, and that money is going to get invested if you make that decision, it may be necessary for the CEO to win and do that. But I think that if you don’t get all of the pieces perfectly right in the RAPID framework, this concept of come to the solution, include people that recognize that not all voices providing input have or have to have the same weight, blocking ability, et cetera, and try to be as clear as possible as to who’s going to make the decision can be quite valuable.

Absolutely. And what I love about this is how it starts with the recommend piece, where you’re identifying who first proposed it, the issue, and the solution. Because often over time, the person that brought it forward gets lost in the process. So the idea person, and may have not been involved, they may not be able to influence or have the input or do whatever, but they brought the idea forward. And employees want to be seen, heard, and valued. So recognizing the person who’s recommending it at the top, to me, that really called to me. And I don’t know, have you ever had a situation where your idea got lost in a process?

Probably. I’m good at blocking stuff out. I think I’ve been fortunate now between Compass and Harness to generally be in the room. There are a lot of instances where what I thought ought to happen didn’t happen. In some instances, for good reason, I came with one approach and was convinced by others in that discussion to go a different approach. In my prior company, I had a recommendation. The CEO chose a different path. I think it’s also important to, as much as possible, live by sort of an agree and commit framework that even regardless of who you are in that RAPID framework, if you’re able to provide a view, hopefully it’s heard, digested, and decision is made to get on board and seek to whatever the implications may be, enable that decision, the company, et cetera, to have the best outcome and benefit from it, even if you didn’t disagree. So agreeing, commit, disagreeing, commit is important.

It’s a sign for a leader when you come with an idea and your employees convince you to do something else, it’s a sign you’ve hired a good team, that you’ve got some bench. So that’s great. In addition to Mochary’s The Great CEO Within, are there any other authors that you follow? Someone when an article or a book or a podcast drops, you put that on your list of things to hear or read?

It’s not continuous, but I’ll say of the business books I’ve read, the one that stuck with me the most is Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, in that it just more so than many other great books I’ve read, you can empathize and sort of feel comfort at the same time as someone in the trenches with how challenging it can be, how close a business can come to running out of cash or running into an unsolvable competitor or structural supplier issue, et cetera, and still end up having a great outcome. Not always, but I think just understanding that complexity, challenges, et cetera is super valuable. I would say I kind of move in between tax industry podcasts because I want to have a pulse on sort of what is happening in the space that we are building and playing and hoping to innovate around, in addition to some general interest stuff and depending on my headspace, that may be acquired for a multi-hour journey of how a business was built, or it could be smart lists for sort of fairly mindless but entertaining, time-killing if you’re on a long drive or on a trip, et cetera.

But I think the more input you can get, the better. I would say that a lot of my personal reading is either history or biography. Share on X

I’m reading a biography right now of Henry Kissinger that Walter Isaacson read, that Elon Musk biography was sort of curious to step back further onto that similar, very rigorous approach to understanding a complicated person who’s both admired and also not so highly viewed by others and what that looks like and how decisions get made, et cetera. So ,the volume of data points, I think is helpful in not being too focused on one, but I think the Matt Mochary book and some of the writings he’s done around is helpful as like a framework from a business operator standpoint, certainly.

Who knows? A little while down the timeline, we may be reading a biography about David Snider and changing the financial futures for people. Let’s look at your employees. If I were to ask them to describe your management or leadership style, how do you think they would respond to me?

You never know for sure, but certainly, what I’d hope, and this was the case when I was COO, CFO before this, and then in this role is that I’m a source of calm and confidence. I definitely perceive the metaphor to be that in the role that I had before and in this one for people not to see how furiously the feet under the water may be churning to keep the ship moving, whether that’s for employees, for clients, whatever the case may be. The hope is that it feels predictable. And I think that’s also really important. And I think most people in the company would say there are not a lot of decisions that get made that feel totally out of the blue or incongruently with past conversations or past approaches that we had. Now we’ve had significant evolution in the way that we go to market. We started as a pure play marketplace. We’re now a vertical SaaS business with that marketplace. We’ve tried a lot of new things, et cetera. So it doesn’t have to be incongruent with evolving the business, but I think I’ve seen other leaders where it’s like you’re on a sailboat and they only know how to tack versus being on a motorboat and being able to course correct or give people a little more warning before the boom comes swinging around. And they’re doing a lot of this to get from point to point in a way that I think is challenging for people to adjust to. So I try as best I can to, especially for my direct reports and also for all of our weekly all-team meetings that I tend to talk a lot in, ensure that I’m giving people enough information that they have the context on what we’re doing, what’s gone well, what is underperformed and how we’re attacking that. We try to share board materials with the team after the fact to give a sense of how we’re doing, sharing our monthly KPIs that we use on the leadership team and in our board, we do semi-annual employee feedback surveys and try to ask the same questions so you can see the trajectory of questions and answers by team over time, et cetera, to see, hey, are people feeling better today than they were 6 months ago or worse across different dimensions of growth opportunities, buying on the mission, likelihood to recommend Harness as a place to work for peers, et cetera. So, yeah, the more consistency in context, I think the better.

As someone who’s had an opportunity to talk to you twice now, not as an employee, but someone as a colleague in a collegial sense, I can say that in addition to being calm and confident, sharing information, being open, I find you to be very clear and very, very responsive. So I thank you for that. So that’s how you show up for me. And once again, we’re going to change directions just a little bit. What are you working on right now that excites you the most?

Well, I would say in general, the highs are much higher and the lows are much lower when you’re running your own business, et cetera. And I think that driver of those highs occasionally is a win, signing a client you’ve worked on for a long time or something like that. But it’s most, for me, euphoric when you feel like there’s some insight that gets unlocked from a conversation or something else, a different application of the business, a potential partner, something else, even more so than when it actually happens, which hopefully it does, some of the time isn’t having that. And I think that we’ve been very positively surprised in the last few months at the excitement of a lot of financial advisors and other kind of large-scale players in the ecosystem that we at Harness exist and are actually providing this institutional quality tax offering in sort of the upper middle market where there’s all of a sudden national scale, very contemporary, best-in-breed technology solutions, but those are being powered by very talented, experienced tax advisors. And so I think that was one of those where I didn’t really think about it. It kind of came out of a few organic conversations with some venture and corp dev teams at big organizations. But it’s been a valuable new vector for the business and its growth. And one that I get excited about exploring because it allows us to amplify the scale of who we can serve if we’re not just bringing people through the content or other direct activities, but actually doing so by having one, the trust of really large, incredibly well-respected institutions that are comfortable partnering with us to help serve their clients.

Great. Thank you so much. What have I not asked you about either yourself or Harness Wellness that I should have? What do we need to know?

Well, for me, and I think the nature of what one of your many roles is sort of speaks to it with Vistage, which is, as I understand it, not a part of it, but a network of executives being able to connect and discuss key issues and sort of have shared learnings, et cetera. To me, the most valuable thing from a learning perspective, in addition to reading extensively and other stuff as an executive, whether it’s CEO or whether it’s a business owner, et cetera, is having opportunities either with the same group of similarly placed leaders or with a evolving and diverse set in different contexts to have discussions and understand how other folks are tackling your same problems. And so, I’ve had a ton of value attending the Dialogue Conference, which is one that attracts people from a bunch of different groups. I’ve been fortunate early on through family to get invited to a conference called Renaissance Weekend, which also brings together public policy leaders and business leaders and others together. Vistage, EO, there are a lot of others that do something similar, but I think that is tremendously valuable both for mental health, and having people to talk about, it’s challenging internally in some cases to express all the things that are weighing on you or weighing you down. And so that’s been very, very beneficial for me. And certainly that I encourage other earlier stage founders to figure out how to capture because it’s challenging, especially if you don’t have a lot of people in the business that you think of as sort of day in, day out co-founders or others to provide that resource to. I think as it relates to Harness Wealth, what’s exciting is like, it’s as much a learning opportunity for me as it is for our clients. And I think we set out to create the most dynamic platform for business owners and equity holders to be able to solve their key financial and tax issues in the ways that they believe they need to. So it’s not one-size-fits-all. For some people, it’s a place to get a South Dakota trust done to create some Section 1202 QSBS optimization. For others, it’s about a great holistic wealth manager. For many, it’s about business or tax services that can feel overwhelming and antiquated, and us hopefully helping that to feel much more contemporary, consultative, and value-add for people. So when those issues pop up, word of mouth is obviously wonderful if you have peers that have great resources, but when those things emerge and you’re looking for another resource, we hope that we can also be part of that conversation, dialogue for business owners and equity holders in a variety of different profiles that are looking for a labor of love resource. We’ve really curated people that we are confident. I remember executive team typically works with one or multiple advisors ourselves. We sort of dog food it as they say in the product world to help navigate any complex issues.

Fantastic. And I did not ask you to discuss peer advisories. I appreciate you doing that. Peer advisory groups. We do find that leaders, there’s a lot of isolationism. Who do you talk to? If you’re having issues in your company or in your industry, you don’t want to upset the next people in line. You go into a room of people that are in similar or not similar industries, depending on the type of peer advisory group, and you have an opportunity to just bounce ideas in a safe space. And so peer advisory groups are something that I recommend for leaders as well. We are coming down to the end of our time. How should anyone find out more about your company or more about you? How can we get in touch with you?

Sure. So our website is harnesswealth.com. It’s got everything there across financial advisory, tax, trust, and estate. And on the off chance, we’ve got tax advisors or financial advisors listening, there’s also sections around them because we’re very collaborative in the ecosystem and working with great professionals that deliver advice. For me personally, I’m probably most active on LinkedIn. I do see and respond to everything that comes through and some degree on Twitter and other places, David Snider HW, but I would say LinkedIn is definitely the most active channel for stuff. But it’s been a pleasure to speak with you.

Thank you so much, David, for your time. I know how precious it is. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Krista.

 

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