From a podcast interview featuring Scott Wozniak, CEO of Swoz Consulting
In this episode of CEO Growth Talks, host Pete Hayes interviews David Bull, CEO and Founder of Ark Financial. David Bull is a dynamic force reshaping wealth management. Once set on a very different path, he redirected his calling to revolutionize financial services for entrepreneurs. His vision goes beyond traditional advisory roles, merging purpose and pragmatism into a modern, approachable model that redefines what a family office can be.
Forging a new path in financial planning, David shifted from conventional services to creating a model that meets the direct needs of founders and business owners. His approach moves away from outdated “kitchen table” discussions and instead embraces clear, strategic financial guidance that empowers clients to plan for growth, protection, and long-term legacy.
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“A family office is not meant solely to help people make more money; rather, it is designed to encapsulate the purpose, goals, and objectives of a family and sustain them through multiple generations. David Bull |
Wealth management is redefined through a fractional family office model for entrepreneurs.
Comprehensive financial planning integrates tax, risk, and legacy considerations.
Innovative use of AI and offshore support streamlines service operations.
A commitment to Protection, Peace, and Purpose underpins the strategic approach.
Global outreach and education empower both advisors and entrepreneurs.
Follow David Bull on LinkedIn
Follow Pete Hayes on LinkedIn
[Episode Transcript]
[00:00:00] Pete Hayes: Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of CEO Growth Talks. I'm your host, Pete Hayes, and it's my pleasure to welcome our guest today, David Bull, CEO and Founder of Ark Financial. And Ark Financial, you're gonna find out, is a really cool kind of boutique firm that brings a twist to the whole family office idea. Because they really—more than where you think family offices, if you're even familiar with that term—they bring a twist to it, because they bring the benefit of a family office to entrepreneurs and smaller business owners.
[00:00:37] Pete Hayes: This is about wealth management in a larger context than you might be thinking of. But David, welcome to the program.
[00:00:44] David Bull: Thanks, Pete. Glad to be here.
[00:00:45] Pete Hayes: Yeah. Tell us about how this idea came about, 'cause Ark Financial is really quite different from other wealth management kinds of operations, isn't it?
[00:00:53] David Bull: Quite different. Yeah. To even put us in the wealth management sphere is a stretch at this point. Going back—the goal wasn't family office when we got started. Not even close. I thought I was gonna be a missionary overseas, and then God shut that door. Went into the marketplace, started in financial services, and found that kitchen table talk with mom and dad, or husband and wife, was not really my thing. Entrepreneurs, business owners were more direct, to the point, fast decision-makers—that was.
[00:01:21] Pete Hayes: Now, when you say kitchen table talk, you mean in terms of how wealth managers typically talk to a couple about their—
[00:01:27] David Bull: No, like when you're 22, 21 years old, and you're told, “Hey, go—”
[00:01:32] Pete Hayes: “Do your life this way.”
[00:01:35] David Bull: Yeah, no. Show up literally at 9:00 PM at people's homes and talk to them after they get home from work. And that just was not the plan for my future. No. And so, all that to say, husband and wives struggle to communicate as it is, and trying to go through that conversation at the time was difficult.
[00:01:51] David Bull: Business owners were more to the point. But selling them life insurance, or from a business owner's perspective—life insurance, even portfolio—assets, how they're deploying their capital. It's on the list of needs, but it's way down.
[00:02:05] Pete Hayes: You were doing that? You were selling life—were you doing that?
[00:02:07] Pete Hayes: Yeah. I mean—
[00:02:08] David Bull: I was doing financial services. So, basic financial planning, life insurance, disability.
[00:02:14] Pete Hayes: Financial, in context—how many years ago was that?
[00:02:17] David Bull: That was a while. What is that now? I guess 15 years ago.
[00:02:22] Pete Hayes: Okay, so Ark Financial is how many years old?
[00:02:24] David Bull: As a brand, we launched in 2013.
[00:02:27] Pete Hayes: All right. Okay. That's helpful. All right, so keep going?
[00:02:29] David Bull: Yeah. So, then you fast forward a little while, working with business owners, wanting to work up higher on more of the fun stuff and things they cared about—like how do you pay less in tax? How do you actually streamline cash flow? How do you protect against risks and litigation and all these other things?
[00:02:45] David Bull: How do you not pay a ton in insurance premiums that continually go up every year? How do you organize your different advisors? How do you not want to throw something at your CPA or your attorney when they bill you too much or they don't do what you think they could do? And so, we—launched a consulting company along the way and did all of those different tactical planning components for our different clients that were business owners. And after a period of time hanging out with more ultra-high-net-worth individuals that had formalized their own family office, realized that there was a better model that could work for the founders and entrepreneurs that we serve.They weren’t billionaires—may never be billionaires—but they were very high-income earners, and they had substantial net worths, but most of it was tied up in their business asset.
[00:03:31] David Bull: And so I looked at their model and was like, “All right, these family offices are primarily investment vehicles for the billionaires.” Like Bill Gates, for example, has Cascade Investments, the largest farm-owning entity in the country. It's all around how do you deploy capital, redeploy capital. And there's other bells and whistles to it, but the way that they formulate it is they've got the attorneys, the CPAs, the CIOs—all of the different key advisors—literally work in truly a business. They're on payroll only, exclusively—for the family, working together. And they'll use other third-party advisors as needed to accomplish the family's goals and objectives. And I thought, that's brilliant.
[00:04:07] David Bull: Now, our needs for our clients—our founders and entrepreneurs—aren’t the same. They don’t have a hundred million dollars that they’re trying to cut to deploy and redeploy. They've got issues like tax and cash flow and advisors. And how do you translate this to second generation since they're first generation? And how do you have those conversations? How do you organize, create dashboards in their world—things that are less investment-centric, more active business-centric? So, took those principles, and fast forward to where we are today—bundled up the consulting company into what we now call a fractional family office. Or, as somebody told me recently, an approachable family office.
[00:04:42] Pete Hayes: So, that's just a crazy expression—fractional family office. I don't think anybody that's watching this is gonna relate to the Bill Gates-like family offices. No, but they're really common for people that have hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars. They will run their financial world out of a staffed—family office that does these things. Let me swing way over to where you're not. Because when we think of that, I think we're just thinking of somebody that's maybe managing our stock portfolio and our IRAs and so forth. And your blend is tax planning, estate planning. It seems like there are skill sets that your team has to have that span things far beyond just an investment environment. Am I getting that right?
[00:05:24] David Bull: Yeah, you're getting it right. All the different plannings that you can imagine are things that we would do. We've got CPAs and attorneys and CFOs and CIOs—and all of 'em in-house. We've got a lead that will essentially work with those clients that are pretty competent in the tax, finance, and legal arenas. It's different than wealth management. And if you've talked to a financial advisor—and attorney, for that matter—and you handed them your tax return—
[00:05:46] David Bull: If they can't read it, they wouldn't know how. Or if you hand your CPA an operating agreement or legal agreements, they're not going to assist you in reading the legal agreements. And so, we can do all of that. We go through all of the things that actually really matter to—most entrepreneurs and founders—either from a risk perspective or from a net worth increase, or really an alignment of their world to the goals that they're trying to achieve.
[00:06:10] Pete Hayes: I'm gonna back up again. Ark Financial, the term Ark—and it's not Arc, it's the other Ark. Where did the inspiration for this come from, and what are you trying to communicate there?
[00:06:20] David Bull: I thought I was gonna be a missionary, so I guess, as the Lord said, "Hey, you gotta go in the marketplace for a while," which I thought was for a while. Now, I'm super passionate about it.
[00:06:27] David Bull: Love the marketplace. The thought was, back in the day when we didn't have all the things that we do today, it had to be an "A"—so it was the top of the alphabet, maybe the phone books still existed. It had to be strong, it had to be short, and it had to be biblical. And so someone once threw out Ark.
[00:06:42] David Bull: I thought about it—Noah's Ark. I'm like, that works. Not only does it check all of those four things, but there are so many analogies you can draw from that story to where we are today. And most people think, "Oh, you're like a steward, or you're a protectionary," and there is a component of that. But I think the bigger story arc was there was the promise.
[00:07:01] David Bull: The promise, both not just for his family, but for humanity as a whole, and how that played out longer term. The end of that story was really the fulfillment of that promise, and we look at that as well with our families to say, "Hey, are we really worried about just simply protecting ourselves from the rain and the waters, or are we actually looking at the bigger promise and story for your family—and how we're actually going to move towards that longer term?"
[00:07:23] Pete Hayes: Okay. Is that kind of an encapsulation of your philosophies, or are there other philosophies that help shape who you are? It's a whole thing—a mission? Are you on mission in this regard?
[00:07:34] David Bull: Oh, for sure. So, our mission is to glorify God, transform the financial industry by serving clients better, with a vision that one day everyone will have a family office. And we really do mean everyone—not just business owners and entrepreneurs. We can't satisfy the whole world today. We can just go after one specific market. But we hope to inspire the industry to truly take what has mostly been historically for royalty, then moved to today's quote-unquote royalty, which would be your ultra-net-worth, and bring that access down to others.
[00:08:01] David Bull: A family office is not to help people make more money; it's to encapsulate the purpose, the goals, the objectives of a family, and see them through multi-generations. For your billionaires and ultra-high-net-worth individuals, that's moving wealth through the generations. That's a big part of their purpose. And so there's a lot of investment focus to it, but there's a whole lot more—they're actually trying to create multi-generational transfer, both not just of wealth, but also of knowledge.
[00:08:30] Pete Hayes: Wow. That takes you far beyond just managing the dollars trajectory and so forth. How do you engage in that final chapter of generational transfer?
[00:08:41] David Bull: Let me take it back a step, because I think we'll answer that question a little bit.
[00:08:45] David Bull: So, we’ve talked about these things all the time—three Ps: Protection, Peace, and Purpose. They're our driving forces internally. And it's because if you think about most business owners and entrepreneurs, they go on this journey of entrepreneurship where they hop in the proverbial boat to get away from their past. And their scorecard for so long, as they get out in the middle of the sea, is the distance between where they are and where they were. How do I get as far away from either that physical pain or poverty pain, poor pain—whatever it might be? And their mindset is really sitting in the back of the boat, looking at the past. And then life gets complicated, because you get all these other people in the boat with you—your spouse, your kids, or others. No one has the same shared pain. No one has the same shared past. So you don't have any ability to communicate about truly what your scorecard is and whether your success and the goal is actually to move to the front of the ship and look into the future—or your future purpose or calling.
[00:09:40] David Bull: But to do that, we believe there are actually three things you have to do, which are Protection, Peace, before Purpose. Protection meaning doing all the stuff that all the advisors try to do today—and a lot of them do it well, like you mentioned, Pete—like estate planning, tax planning, dashboards, advisory teams, all the planning stuff.
[00:09:57] David Bull: But what most people miss is this peace part. And peace is truly the foundation, in my mind, before you can get to purpose—which is knowledge of what you've done, alignment with the others in the boat, and a community of peers that will keep you moving in the right direction. So, most advisors do the work and the clients don't understand what was done, and therefore they have no chance of actually having alignment with their spouse. And they don't have a group of peers that they run with that have done the same. It's really hard to engage in a true purpose-calling type conversation. So that's our barometer for what we look like.
[00:10:30] David Bull: Then, we want to instill that into G2 so that they understand it as well. Like, my whole life isn't about running away from pain; it's about running towards this purpose and calling, and then aligning goals and objectives in my life.
[00:10:41] Pete Hayes: Where did this come from? G2, by the way, is the next generation, I presume. But where’d this idea come from—that entrepreneurs are in a boat, trying to get away from where they've been, that they're in pain? I've never heard that expression before. Where's that come from?
[00:10:54] David Bull: We're Ark, so everything has to be nautical. You could use others. It probably comes out of my days of going through the Romans Road. If I look at Jesus as the mentor here—I didn't see this until probably a few years ago—but if you think about what He did when He showed up here on Earth, He didn’t come and just proclaim purpose.
[00:11:10] David Bull: In fact, He said, "I don't want you to tell anybody about my identity." He literally came, and He healed the sick. He helped the lame walk. He helped the blind see. He actually did that. And then He still didn’t say, "Hey, here’s what salvation is, blah, blah, blah, blah, here’s who I am." Then He taught them. He gave them knowledge. He did the Sermon on the Mount. What did He also do? He helped connect them together. He said, "I'm gonna help you draw alignment. I'm gonna give you specific teaching in how to communicate with a husband and wife and as friends." And then He built a huge community. Then, they had this protection, they had this great peace—and then He revealed Himself.
[00:11:45] David Bull: I didn’t see it until the backs—until I was going through this journey, working with clients, stumbling forward, figuring out, "Why can't you do bigger goals?" 'Cause I would always hit 'em hard—"Hey, don't you want to talk about big goals?" And there were all these other things that had to happen. And I didn’t realize that there was a playbook that had existed.
[00:12:00] Pete Hayes: So as entrepreneurs, we're carrying around a bunch of baggage. We come into your offices and the initial assumption was, yeah, let's talk about the future, whatever. And what you're finding is that there's a bigger story, there's a wholeness to get solved in that whole process—for their family surroundings, for the spouse. They need to understand things that maybe they don't get to understand in any other way. This is deep, David.
[00:12:25] David Bull: Yeah. It's not just applicable to our space. We want it in healthcare too, right? Today, we want to go in and we have pain, so we want the medicine, and the doctors should give it to us. But they should also potentially double back and say, I've given you the medicine, you're not in pain—how do we take this a little bit further? So we're just doing the same thing here. When clients come and they say, "I'm paying too much in tax," we don't say, "Hold the horses, grab wine and cheese, and let's sit down for five hours and have a therapy session." That's not the answer. We save them on their tax, but our purpose behind doing so is because we know it's a step towards a more long-term, fulfilling thing for them.
[00:12:59] Pete Hayes: Whoa. Wow. By the way, I probably should have said in full transparency, I am a client of Ark Financial, and they've done awesome things for me. I should have mentioned that up front.
[00:13:11] David Bull: And we've known each other for a while.
[00:13:13] Pete Hayes: Yes, we've known each other for a while and there's all sorts of stories there, but your business completely fascinates me 'cause I don't know anything like it.
[00:13:20] Pete Hayes: It's fantastic. But I also know—and I think this has to do with one, that you—I'll just say you have a very high intellect, David, and you don't seem to—another maybe "rolling stone gathers no moss" type of thing—you don't seem to sit still for very long. You're always looking for ways to go bigger.
[00:13:37] Pete Hayes: What does technology look like in your space? Because there seems to be a lot of touch, but I'm just betting that technology is a big deal to you, both in terms of the immediate way you support your clients and maybe in other ways. So, I'd love to just hear you talk about how the technology supports your business.
[00:13:55] David Bull: Yeah. So many different things. We're embracing AI—as probably many are. Even today, I've got four different agents I'm building for different purposes. Security is extraordinarily important, and so there are some limiters on how much we can, right now, use and still keep clients' information private. But it's just allowing us to go further and faster. So AI is huge. Actually, the combination of AI and offshore is also huge. Offshore has been around for a long period of time. I wouldn't necessarily consider that technology, but with AI being able to remove language barriers, remove accent barriers, and remove intellectual barriers, it's allowing for everybody in our organization now, at this point, to have an assistant. Everybody in our organization is not just gonna have an EA, but they're also gonna have a technical assistant as well, that's gonna allow them to do stuff—just things that weren't practical in the past, either cost-effective or the talent pool wasn't there.
[00:14:52] David Bull: AI's enabling that. Not because the people didn't exist before—there just wasn't a good way to connect them.
[00:14:57] Pete Hayes: Am I getting this right? So AI as an assistant, but then you said offshore—is that a human?
[00:15:03] David Bull: Yeah. AI isn't a full replacement for humans in their role in society today. But when you couple the AI with the offshore help—to smooth out language barriers and accents and things like that—there's so much potential to bring people from all over the world in to come and support.
[00:15:20] Pete Hayes: You described it as agents, so that's beyond what we think of as a ChatGPT. Does an agent actually do things? Are they activating things?
[00:15:28] David Bull: So when I think of an agent, I'm probably using the term incorrectly 'cause I'm not a technologist by any means. But I think about training our own GPTs with our own knowledge base, and not just from an access knowledge base perspective, but actually training them to operate in a specific way and engage in a specific way. Then, through other workflows and automations, you can actually get them to go and join into meetings and then pull information and push information in a certain way. There's a spectrum on how much engagement they can have.
[00:15:57] Pete Hayes: Wow. Where do you see this going?
[00:15:59] David Bull: So, many people are so scared about AI, and they think it's gonna replace all these jobs. And I guess it's gonna replace the jobs, but I don't think it's gonna replace the people.
[00:16:08] David Bull: I talked about some of this the other day. Take grocery stores, for example. They eventually got self-checkout, and did it replace the jobs? Absolutely. But what it did—it required them to index and code the entire grocery store, which then allowed for online shopping, which then allowed for in-person shoppers that deliver groceries. So what did it do? It actually increased the amount of talent that the grocery stores need.
[00:16:29] David Bull: We're gonna see the same thing in most of the different services, and I'm trying to get ahead of it in our space. As we're growing rapidly, we've launched a coaching and education academy toward those that aren't in a place to hire us. That's for your up-and-coming entrepreneur that's not at a higher level of income. But as that's growing quickly, we need a ton of advisors to serve in a fractional capacity to all of these. And it just so happens that CFOs and CPAs, attorneys, and wealth management advisors have less to do because technology has really enabled them to go faster—which is awesome—but it means that they need to get broader.
[00:17:08] David Bull: It's not, in my opinion, okay for an advisor to not be able to read a tax return anymore or a legal document. And so, we're launching an advisor academy to actually take CFOs, CPAs, attorneys, wealth managers, advisors, etc., and train them how to do this approachable family office so that we can marry the two together. So, you say, "Oh, that's a good idea," but it actually wasn't possible without AI and technology and where it's going—and where it's pushing the people in general, or the industry at large, and also enabling those connections to happen.
[00:17:38] Pete Hayes: Wow. So in your business, which is taking off like gangbusters—from my understanding, it is unique in everything I've ever seen.
[00:17:48] Pete Hayes: I'm gonna ask you some more questions about who should be considering talking to Ark Financial, but it sounds like you just described the technology, especially on the AI with your agents and your training and so forth. Without that, you probably couldn't scale to the level that you're planning to. Am I getting that right?
[00:18:07] David Bull: No, it would be impossible. It would be a lot slower. There are only so many people that can deliver on what we do, and so the talent pool just doesn't support it.
[00:18:16] Pete Hayes: Yeah, it's what so many companies, especially professional services companies, are trying to figure out—how to tap their knowledge base, the decades of experience that they have, to serve their clients more quickly and better and more deeply, to bring people on more quickly—as I think we're doing at Chief Outsiders as well. Who's a fit for your business? Who's not a fit for your business?
[00:18:37] David Bull: Entrepreneurs, founders, first-generation entrepreneurs that have profits in their companies greater than a million dollars are a great fit for our family office, where we come alongside them and help them pay a lot less in tax, do all the planning that we've talked about, but really actually align everything in their world towards a greater purpose and higher prosperity for their life. That's where they're a good fit. It doesn't matter what industry, it doesn't matter where they're located, it doesn't matter if they're a U.S. citizen—we work with people all around the country and all around the world. For our academy, it would be people that are up and coming into that. They've got enough where they can get away from the business for a couple hours a month to figure out some tips of the trade and are willing to put some time into it themselves.
[00:19:13] David Bull: Essentially, our academy is—we don't do it for you, we train you how to do it yourself and not make you have to go through the whole world of information to figure out what you should be working on. So, we've got two different clients. We're exclusively focused on first-generation entrepreneurs, or second or third, that have embraced that first-generation mindset.
[00:19:31] Pete Hayes: And are there people that just aren't the right fit? You described the spot, so it'd be outside... So I guess actually, you need at least a million—so that went up—and then not there yet, or working your way to... Then there's the academy. You're really trying to hit a pretty broad part of the entrepreneurial marketplace?
[00:19:49] David Bull: Yeah, we are. I mean, we're pretty broad on the entrepreneurial side. Where we're not a fit is for those that are at a level of income or net worth where they should really set up their own single family office. At that point, we could probably direct them to the right tools, but we're not the right company to do that. Or for those that are just completely swamped inside the business and need to alleviate some time. If they're working a hundred hours a week, trying to turn a profit, trying to make some things happen, then it's probably better to go and hire an organizational consultant—or if growth is your issue, Chief Outsiders—to really get some of the business moving in the right direction before engaging with us.
[00:20:24] David Bull: Because most people will try to engage us 'cause they want to pay less in tax, or they've got some specific pain point—and those things are good and healthy to make happen—but oftentimes there are bigger pain points in the business that should get addressed first. So, when people are in that position, we always push them back: "Hey, go fix some of these business problems."
[00:20:40] Pete Hayes: Oh, that's excellent. Okay, as you can tell, everybody that's listening, it's easy to tell you're passionate about what you do because it's so purposeful. But you have some things on the side that are bolted to this. You have something called Switchboard. What's that all about?
[00:20:54] David Bull: Yeah, anytime I have some free time, I've gotta figure out how to start something new. Switchboard is how I scratch the itch of not going into the mission field, honestly. It was about in 2020, 2019—I thought I was gonna hang the hat on marketplace—as my wife and I were going to the training school and everything like that.
[00:21:11] David Bull: And I—
[00:21:12] Pete Hayes: Training school to be a missionary?
[00:21:13] David Bull: School to be able to actually go and live overseas. It wasn't because there was any prodding. It was just like, that's what we thought we were gonna do—let's go make it happen. And I had this interaction with somebody overseas that said, "Hey, you know what I need? I need business owners that will sign letters of recommendation, that will hop on a coaching call, and that will invest into high-quality assets globally." I'm like, I can do all three of those things, and I have tons of friends that would do all those things. If we could do that, we could just change the landscape of the globe. And I'm like, great—let's go do that.
[00:21:47] David Bull: Fast forward—that iterated into this concept that became Switchboard. And the pandemic, which I thought crushed the idea, actually accelerated the idea. It's essentially a software and algorithm that matches believers around the world with needs around the world. It started with just essentially one-hour coaching calls—if you had something to offer—and it could be a homeschool mom that wanted support on homeschooling or prayer, or it could be someone like myself to offer finance support, or someone like you to offer business or growth support to a business owner overseas. And we created that algorithm, that software, that matching. And now today, we've got thousands of people on the platform—on both sides—both mission organizations and missionaries across the world, as well as believers here in the States or in Europe or, really at this point, all around the world. And they match their gifts and talents with one another.
[00:22:36] David Bull: So, it was the idea of saying: How can I do more globally than just simply giving money? And how can I use these unique gifts and talents that I have and express them globally? And Switchboard has made that happen. And it's only happened because of technology and high-speed internet and Zoom and AI and all these other things that have really come online in the last three years.
[00:22:55] David Bull: It's the fun project that I had a spark to launch with a friend of mine, and then it's Scott, our Executive Director, who's done 99% of the work and built it to so much more than we thought.
[00:23:05] Pete Hayes: Wow, that must be incredibly fulfilling.
[00:23:09] David Bull: It's so fulfilling. It really does scratch that itch of being like, all right, I get it—marketplace ministry, they've all come together. I can see the Lord chuckling.
[00:23:17] Pete Hayes: You've done so much, David. You're a young man. You're a decade-plus into your own business. Where does this go? Do you have a vision—any sort of vision? What does 10 years, 20 years look like? Is it just more of this, or do you imagine that there's other things that...
[00:23:33] David Bull: Our vision is that one day everyone will have a family office. So, I'm committed to that until that happens. And if it happens—great—I would love to go jump into the education system. But in the meantime, I think this is a pretty big vision. And so, where I see us going as a company is that—I tell our team all the time—we're really just a startup. We're like the slowest startup on the planet. It's been going on for nearly 15 years. But I say that because to achieve that vision, we have to go more than just trying to serve everyone. We have to become a thought leader in the space.
[00:24:00] David Bull: I don't have a vision that one day everyone will have an Ark family office. I just want everyone to have a family office and shape the industry. And so, long-term, we'll probably become a media company and a thought leader—and likely a software platform as well—that really brings tools and services to advisors globally and consumers globally, to help them truly build and run the family office and become more mission-aligned families.
[00:24:23] Pete Hayes: That's what you get with such a big vision, 'cause there almost is no end in sight. It's hard to imagine a day when you say, "That's done." So, well, David, this has been a total joy spending some time with you. I'm so impressed with what you're building, what you've built, the lives you've impacted, the families you've impacted, the businesses you've encouraged. Anyway, congratulations and thanks for joining us today.
[00:24:45] David Bull: Yeah. Thanks, Pete.
[00:24:46] Pete Hayes: Okay, we'll see you next time on CEO Growth Talks.