The Advisor Library

Matt Cosgriff
  • 5.0 (4)
  • Management

The Advisor Library is a leadership podcast for RIA executives, advisors, and operators who want to go deeper than tactics. Each episode, host Matt Cosgriff sits down with one of the wealth management industry's top leaders — CEOs, founders, and builders — to explore the single book that most shaped how they think, lead, and build enduring firms. This isn't a show about market trends or product pitches. It's about the ideas behind great leadership — and the real-world experience of putting them to work inside advisory businesses. If you run, build, or lead in the RIA space, this is the reading list you didn't know you needed.

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    Strong Ground: Pocket Presence and a Lifelong Reading Habit, with Dan Wanous

    Dan Wanous got into wealth management at a New Year's Eve party. He was a junior in college, talking macro econ with a family friend who ran an advisory firm in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and got hooked interning there the following summer. A decade at Thrivent later, he landed at 49 Financial and helped launch its sister firm, Alongside, where he now leads business development and partner growth. Dan and I spend most of our time on Strong Ground, Brené Brown's newest, and two ideas he'd already underlined before we hit record: compensatory injuries, the notion that the thing that hurts is rarely the thing that's broken, and pocket presence, the football term for confidence built on preparation instead of fear or arrogance. We also get into Katharine Graham's Personal History, the story of a woman who inherited the Washington Post after her husband's suicide and built it into the paper that broke Watergate, and Scaling People, Claire Hughes Johnson's field manual for hiring and onboarding that Dan says he's pulled off the shelf mid-crisis more than once. If you care about staying composed under pressure, reading with intention, and building a team the right way, this one's for you.

  2. 6d ago

    Four Thousand Weeks: Advising in a Finite Life, with Thomas Pargett

    Thomas Pargett didn't set out to become a wealth advisor. He spent four years teaching fourth grade in Lincoln, Nebraska before a mentor told him something that stuck: the best advisors are the best teachers. A decade, an MBA, and a CFP later, he's advising clients across the country at Boulay Wealth and he's become one of the most curious readers I know. To kick off The Advisor Library, Thomas and I get into the books that shaped how he thinks, leads, and advises. We dig into Four Thousand Weeks and what changes when you remind a client they might have five hundred weeks left, not five thousand. We talk about The Go-Giver and why, for Thomas, the more he gives the better things seem to go. And we get into the human side of the job: reading "like a wolf eats," the last time you pick up your kid without knowing it's the last time, and what keeps advising personal as AI reshapes everything around it. If you care about reading, leadership, and the craft of advising well, this is a good place to begin.

  • 2 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
4 Ratings

About

The Advisor Library is a leadership podcast for RIA executives, advisors, and operators who want to go deeper than tactics. Each episode, host Matt Cosgriff sits down with one of the wealth management industry's top leaders — CEOs, founders, and builders — to explore the single book that most shaped how they think, lead, and build enduring firms. This isn't a show about market trends or product pitches. It's about the ideas behind great leadership — and the real-world experience of putting them to work inside advisory businesses. If you run, build, or lead in the RIA space, this is the reading list you didn't know you needed.

Information

  • Creator
    Matt Cosgriff
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Matt Cosgriff
  • Show Website
    The Advisor Library