Larry Sprung on Purpose-Driven Advice

At the 2026 Fearless Investing Summit, Torie Happe and grabbed Larry Sprung for a conversation that kept circling back to one idea: the advisors who are going to stay relevant in the age of AI are the ones whose clients actually feel something when they interact with the firm.

Larry has built that kind of practice at Mitlin Financial, and the path he took to get there is one of the more unique stories we’ve ever heard on Money Chronicles.

Larry is a great advisor, but what makes his story worth paying attention to is the series of personal experiences that made him incapable of doing it any other way.

When Purpose Isn’t a Marketing Buzzword

Larry was about twelve when his mother was diagnosed with cancer. His father, a New York City schoolteacher, had to manage everything without any financial guidance. Larry watched that unfold in real time, the stress compounding on top of an already devastating situation, and walked away from it knowing that if his dad had had someone in his corner, it would have mattered.

That’s not a polished origin story Larry tells on stage for effect. It’s the reason he entered the profession right out of college and has never left. When he talks about helping families through difficult moments, there’s a directness to it that you can feel.

He lived the absence of financial advice in his own family, and it shaped everything he built after.

The Niche Nobody Would Have Predicted

If you told most advisors they’d build a meaningful book of business through romance authors, they’d think you were joking. But Larry’s path into that niche is a story about what happens when you stop thinking about business development as a strategy and start thinking about it as a natural outcome of showing up for people.

Tragically, Larry’s brother-in-law died by suicide, and the family became active in mental health awareness. A romance author connected with Larry’s wife about donating book proceeds to the memorial fund. That one author eventually became roughly thirty, all donating to mental health causes every May.

When author conferences invited Larry to speak to their communities, he didn’t go to make a sales pitch. He was there because the community had already adopted him and his family.

And then the business followed because the trust was already there. And today, Mitlin serves a number of romance authors who are, as Larry puts it, business owners at their core. They just happen to build their businesses one book at a time.

The Social Media Lesson He Almost Missed

Larry’s biggest money mistake, by his own admission, wasn’t a bad investment or a client gone wrong. It was resisting social media for too long. His wife Denise pushed him toward it, and he pushed back, until they ran an experiment during a family trip to South Africa in 2019. One post a day, nothing complicated.

After the trip, a client reached out. She was homebound on an oxygen tank. Going to South Africa had been on her bucket list, but she knew she’d never make the trip. She told Larry she’d logged in every single day to follow along, and that she felt like she’d been there with them.

That was the moment it clicked. Social media wasn’t about vanity metrics or lead gen. It was another way to make clients feel like family, which is one of Mitlin’s core values in practice, not just on a wall somewhere.

Why This Matters for the Rest of Us

The wealth industry spends a lot of time talking about AI and automation right now, and for good reason. But Larry’s story is a reminder that the advisors who will thrive through all of it are the ones who have built something that technology can’t replicate: trust that comes from shared experience, vulnerability, and presence over time.

AI can build a financial plan. It can’t sit with a family and ask them why sending their kids to college debt-free matters so much, and then be present when the answer turns out to be something deeply personal.

Larry’s whole practice is built around that impact, and it’s an impact that’s only going to get stronger as the tools get more powerful.

Watch the full conversation on the Three Crowns YouTube channel. And if you work in the wealth industry and want more of this, click subscribe for more stories like this one.

And if you’re ready to stop second-guessing your marketing and start making decisions for growth? Talk to Johnny to get started.