#FA Success Ep 377: Navigating A Major Health Event While Keeping Your Advisory Firm Going And Growing, With Meredith Moore

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Meredith Moore
• Designing Your Economic Masterpiece In A Man's World – Download (PDF)
• Artisan Financial Strategies
• Meredith's TEDx Talk
• "Retirement for High Achievers is Malarkey" by Meredith Moore
• Stand Out by Dorie Clark
• The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America's Wealthy by Thomas J. Stanley
• Coach Joe Lukacs
• New York Life
• eMoney
• MoneyGuidePro
• Dorie Clark's Course "Becoming a Recognized Expert"
• Leadership Atlanta
• CIRCL.ES
• James Clear's Newsletter
• TEDx
• Center for Puppetry Arts
• Entrepreneurs' Organization

Looking for sample client service calendars, marketing plans, and more? Check out our FAS resource page!

Are you a successful financial advisor, or do you know of one that would be a great fit for the Financial Advisor Success podcast? Fill out this form to be considered!

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome Meredith Moore to the "Financial Advisor Success" Podcast.

Meredith: Thanks, Michael. I am so happy to be here. This has been a BHAG of mine for a long time.

Michael: Awesome. I appreciate it. And I'm so glad you're willing to join us and talk about what I think is one of those challenging issues for so many of us as advisors that looms beneath the surface, which is we, a lot of us for...well, the industry likes to put the mega firms up on the pedestal where there's a zillion advisors and all these teams. The overwhelming majority of us, though, are on our own, either literally just us, or maybe there's 1 or 2 administrative and support staff team helping us, like our clients are our clients and we're the only ones that can serve them. And on the one end, that just creates some pressures around capacity, the infamous challenges for a lot of us of I want to go on vacation, but apparently I still need to be available in case they need to do an emergency trade.

But then there's the next layer of what happens if I get sick? What happens if I get really sick and have a serious health issue? I know you have been through one of the more extreme versions of that that someone can go through and have navigated through it and are now here on the other side with I'm sure a lot of perspectives and lessons learned along the way. And so I appreciate your willing to join us and talk about this really sticky issue of what you do and how you handle these situations or even prepare for situations of what if I get really sick as an advisor and I can't work for a while? I can disability insurance my income maybe but if no one serves my clients, there's not going to be anything to come back to at the end. So how do we deal with major health events when we're trying to be a financial advisor?

Meredith's Major Health Event [05:29]

Meredith: Absolutely. So I want to kind of lay the groundwork for me was I felt like I had had this metaphorical successful life, graduated from Georgia Tech, literally right after graduating with an undergrad in industrial engineering, started my practice at 23. And like every young advisor...I think you and I have been in the business around the same time. So this was like '98, '97, '98.

Michael: Okay, yeah. I started this year or 2 after you. Yep.

Meredith: Yep. And you win all the awards that are seemingly important at that time and rookie of the year and blah, blah, blah. And so I felt like things were going really well. And I had gotten married and everything seemed to be sort of perfect, if you will, and didn't have any problem. We didn't have any problems getting pregnant. And I had my son on April 14th, 2005. And right after having him, I started getting headaches. And I don't mean like, hey, the clients calling this is a little headache. But I went to 3 different physicians and kept telling them this. And I was getting blown off as postpartum headaches because I had a newborn at home, and finally... couldn't see a neurologist as a new patient for 90 days. And so the fastest way to the CAT scan was through the ER. So I went to the ER and they're like...and by this point, I'm 30 years old, I have a newborn at home, and the ER doctor's like, "I'm so sorry. You have a 7cm anomaly. We've paged the neurosurgeon. We're admitting you right now." And literally, I told...

Michael: 7cm, that's a sizable 'anomaly'.

Meredith: Right. Well, for all the men out there, size doesn't matter when it comes to brain tumors. It's all about location. I mean, you can have the largest brain tumor in the world, but if it doesn't affect mobility and functioning, it doesn't matter as much. So we didn't know any of this at this point. I knew I was having major headaches and basically I left that ER, because my mom was sitting in chemotherapy, by the way. She talked to her oncologist and she's like, "I wouldn't bring my dog to that hospital." So I left, went to go see a neurosurgeon here in Atlanta, which is where I live. And that guy's like, "Well, we don't know if it's malignant or not, but we need to go ahead and do a craniotomy, get in there and see what's going on." And so that's what I did. So literally the first surgery in my life was a craniotomy, or excuse me, it was a C-section, then it was a craniotomy. And mind you, before I went to Tech, I went to Rice University and I was a Division I swimmer. So, again, I had done well. I was an athlete. I was doing triathlons and this was just like out of nowhere, out of nowhere, out of left field.

And that's why I really wanted to set the stage. You have all this "success." This is the success podcast after all. And then bam, your world gets rocked. And that kind of diagnosis, with brain tumors, you could have benign brain tumors and they can be in a bad place and it's not good, and we didn't know if mine was benign or malignant. And so they did my first craniotomy, which was, again, brain surgery. They literally saw your skull open, they get in there, and they take stuff out. Thankfully, my grandfather was the head...was the COO of the largest pathology group here in Atlanta. And his team was sitting in the operating room with microscopes, and basically the slides showed at that hospital as well as MD Anderson at Duke and UMass and a couple other big brain tumor centers that it was very malignant. It wasn't a little malignant. It was a granddaddy of all of them. What's called the glioblastoma, which is what had killed John Kennedy. It's what killed, excuse me, John McCain and...Ted Kennedy, excuse me. And so a lot of high profile people you may have heard have had this. And so typically a long-term survivor is considered 5 years. Most people do die within 2 years. And if you can't get a good surgery, it's very difficult for people to survive that first year.

Michael: Because it's just so aggressively malignant that it tends to spread quickly and do bad things quickly?

Meredith: No, think of it like tentacles. The problem is people can't get it out. Because the tentacles are spread in different places, and when you start removing parts of the brain, that's bad. And so it's a lack of being able to get what we call a full resection. And the problem with where mine was located was it backed up to what's called your...it was in my right parietal lobe and it backed up to my motor strip. And having had been an athlete, they were very nervous about how to resect it without me losing mobility on my left side.

Michael: Okay.

Meredith: So I did the first craniotomy here in Atlanta and have a lot of thoughts about physicians. That's another podcast though. But, so they had the first one done and because the pathology was so bad, my then-husband had slides sent again to multiple other centers. Duke ended up offering me a clinical trial. Remember, I'm 30. I've got a 6-week-old son at home, and at this point, my mother-in-law's moved in. So it's all sorts of fun. And my mom is dying of breast cancer at this point too. So lots is going on in Meredith's house at this point. So Duke offers the clinical trial. We literally pack a suitcase and drive up to Durham. And so the first thing the neurosurgeon tells me...and by the way, neurosurgeons are a special breed. Love them, but they do have a very special personality. But the first thing they tell me is, you need to redo your resection. And I was like, what? We had been told that this was an aggressive resection. They were as aggressive as they could be. And we were told that the majority had been taken out. But the way they framed it, Michael, was they started with, "Who did your first surgery?" Well, in this business, we all know that if somebody, if another professional says something like that about somebody else's work, that's not good.

Michael: Yeah, yep.

Meredith: That's not good, and so...

Michael: That's usually not like, "Because it's so amazing, I just want to know how they did it."

Meredith: Right. Yeah, that was not the case here, I can assure you of that. And so they said you need to redo it. And so I thought I had hit a low point before. I had an all-time low point now. And I thought, well, this is a surgeon, he just wants to cut. Thinking of our industry, he's just trying to sell me something. And so we went and got a second opinion at MD Anderson. And MD Anderson told me the same thing. They're like, "Who did your first surgery? You need to redo it." Oh yeah. Well, Duke and MD Anderson had kind of a different way of approaching stuff, but I will tell you, Duke, they were way more hopeful and nobody said, "I'm so sorry." I kept hearing, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." I'm like, "I'm not dead. I'm not dead. I'm a big girl. I've dealt with a lot of stuff in my life. I've survived this business we're in, let's figure this out. I'm 30 years old."

And we ended up deciding to go to Duke ultimately. And with Duke, I had to redo the craniotomy. Now, get ready for this one. I redid the next one awake. So I had an awake brain surgery that lasted 6 hours. And because of where the tumor was, they had to wake me back up and talk to me because they wanted to make sure they weren't hitting my motor strip. And so the big joke...and I'm still friends with all the oncologists and surgeons up there, but the big joke is still I tried to sell the surgeon long-term care insurance in the middle of the procedure.

Michael: Yeah.

Meredith: I know. Thank you for all the people out there that write insurance.

Michael: Fantastic. Because we're...what are we now? We're 2005. So yeah, all the big players are still active. Everyone's still got a thriving policy.

Meredith: Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, so we did that and then I got the first good news that I had really gotten since June 1st was when I had originally been diagnosed, and Duke got a clean resection, so they were able to fully remove it. But the problem with glioblastoma is because they are so aggressive You might not be able to see cells, and so that's why people are so cautious. So in answer to your original question, the reason that most people die is because you can't get a full resection because of location. In this case, they did. And then we followed it up with a...then I had my third surgery, which was a clinical trial where they infused a drug into my brain while I sat in Duke's neuro ICU and pondered the meaning of life for the better part of 5 to 7 days. Meanwhile, I have a business, to your point earlier.
What Was The State Of Meredith's Advisory Firm During This? [15:50]

Michael: I was going to say, so what was the state of the advisory firm? I think you said you started late '90s. This is 2005. So you're 6 or 7 years in. So, what was the state of the advisory firm at this point?

Meredith: Yeah, so to that point, early on, I was primarily doing transactions and more on the insurance side. There was some BD work, so there were some retail funds. I had just started charging fees the year before and affiliated with the RIA. I was even ahead of my time relative to my peers at that time having affiliated with an insurance BD and insurance RIA. So I was charging fees at whatever age that was for us, 25, 26. But it was still early on and I didn't have a lot of AUM and I had to...

Michael: So you're a traditional life insurance BD. So the bulk of your business then is...

Meredith: Yes.

Michael: ...good old life disability, long-term care, maybe some variable universal life, at the time, some whole life.

Meredith: And charging, at that point in 2005, $500 to 1000 bucks in a planning fee.

Michael: Right.

Meredith: And I may have had at that point, again, it was so early in the industry, maybe $3 million to $5 million max. Max. So nothing that could sustain the practice and pay for the staff that I even had then. I lost a staff member through this too. Well, we can get there. But to kind of go back to the medical piece, so after I redid the cranny, full resection, did the clinical trial, got out of there, then we had to move up to Durham. I had to move up to Durham to do radiation. I did a lifetime dose of radiation to my brain. So if you want to talk about intense, awake craniotomies are hardcore, but go fry your brain for the better part of 6 weeks. Meanwhile, I've got a husband who's very angry. He's angry at the situation. There's nothing he can really do to help. We would go to Duke's radiation center and there would be people... I'm strolling in with the stroller, there'd be people chain-smoking outside. I mean, it's North Carolina. People are there getting treated for lung cancer. And I was pissed. It was very frustrating. I hadn't...

Michael: You're coming as a D1 athlete, have done everything to take care of myself, and here I am.

Meredith: Right. With a baby no less. They would put the family members in one waiting room and then they would put 4 people in the radiation machine waiting room, and everybody's dying, and the conversations that were had in that small room, Michael, were so intense and it's hard for people to understand the intensity of those conversations. In fact, this crowd will also get it because somebody started talking about essentially what's the equivalent to the living benefit rider, the accelerated benefit rider in a life insurance contract. And I was like...

Michael: I need the money for my care now. I'm not dead yet. What's my family supposed to do?

Meredith: Well, literally, this person, he was dying of prostate cancer and had been for a while and he's like, "I heard that you can do this," just sharing. That's the conversation with other patients. And I'm like, "Well, I know a little bit about this." You share your expertise with 3 other people. But so I waited for my machine every day, 5 days a week for 6 weeks to get my brain fried. And then we would do that routine and then back to the corporate apartment in Durham and trying to pretend like things were normal. And I would call the office, call my staff. I did have another agent or 2 that, still to this day, I'm very grateful to. They would see clients that I needed to be seen and do some transactions. And they were so kind that they would give me much more of the percentage than I probably really earned at that point, more than origination, essentially.

And so at that point, not an established advisor at this point, but I needed some sort of revenue. That being said, my husband had good income. So it isn't like we were destitute or anything like that. And this was the summer...many people can relate to this. This was the summer of Hurricane Katrina and every weekend we'd drive back to Atlanta. We didn't have to do that, but we did that, back to our nice suburban home in North Atlanta to try to pretend like things were normal. And then we would drive back up 6 hours to do it all again. Ultimately, I ended up doing...after I did all the radiation at Duke, and I did that there because I had done the clinical trial, I did chemotherapy in Atlanta under Duke's instructions. And so I worked through that.

And that's where you could also say back to this whole thing is a metaphor for this business. And sometimes we go through tough times and we have to figure out how to navigate around it. And I would block my calendar. I knew specific days I would be having... I'd be having a party with the...be praying to the great porcelain goddess with doing chemotherapy. And that's just what it was. But I was seeing clients, I was on disability claim at this point because my revenues had gone down and I couldn't see people at a fast enough pace.

Michael: Because, of course, as a good young agent, you wrote disability insurance on yourself in your early years.

Meredith: There you go. There you go. And it's very difficult too I'll say because a lot of us don't have high net income early on. And so one thing I'd say to everybody, I don't care how long you've been in the business, I don't care if you have a bill to and AUM, our income is our biggest asset. And sometimes we forget how that really is set up and what the impact will be. I knew enough about those contracts because I began my career writing a lot of it. And I never went on full claim. I was always on residual claim, meaning I got a percentage based upon my percentage of loss with the profit and loss. So that was helpful. But again, I did have...my husband made good money, so it didn't put us back. But it definitely...my production went down. And thankfully, New York Life was kind and generous enough, even though I didn't make contract numbers, not to say, "See ya." So they took a bet on me in that respect.

And I was able to get back to things and I had a great story around this, but where it starts really getting messed up is my mom passed away of breast cancer amidst me in the middle of chemotherapy. Oh, yeah, it was really intense. Now, I will say, I grew up with her being sick since I was in the sixth grade. But there were so many...again, whole other podcast to really go into some of this. But it was very intense. And then I went through a very contentious divorce not a year after that. And so, ironically, people were going to say, what are you talking about? But the divorce was emotionally harder than any of the rest of it. It was terrible. It was terrible. And it was just a very intense time. And I ended up leaving is what happens.

I had to figure my business out. And ironically, after we split, my business started growing very rapidly. And it wasn't because I had left. There were a lot of things. What is it? What's the phrase? Causation isn't...correlation doesn't equal causation, or even vice versa. But I was able to really start growing that business a good bit. I hired my now integrator COO in my practice around that time and been at it since. And it continued to grow from there, but those 3 years were very, very tough and...Go ahead.

Michael: So I'm just trying to visualize the timeline here. The diagnosis comes June 1st.

Meredith: Yep. By the way, I still celebrate that every year. I freak my friends out. I have a thank God I'm still alive party on June 1st.

Michael: I think it's well-earned. So the diagnosis comes June 1st. So how long is this cycle of the brain surgery, and second, and third, and then the heavy dose of chemo? How long did this portion run where you're in just active treatment, knocked out of commission, cycle?

Meredith: Yeah, so the first surgery, again, was in 2005. The second surgery was a month later in 2005. I went through chemotherapy in 2006, but my production started coming back a little bit. And that's when the radiation was in 2005 as well. My mom also died in 2006. So that was very compact. And my divorce really wasn't final until early 2008.

Michael: So as you're going through this cycle of the brain surgeries and the radiation and the chemo, were you completely out of the firm? Were you still trying to do some things to work with your team…?

Meredith: Oh, I was seeing clients.

Meredith: You were seeing clients?

Meredith: Oh yeah. Oh, I'm running a calendar. I'm not working on the days that I'm barfing.

Michael: Wow.

Meredith: Oh, I'm hardcore. I'm still competitive to this day. In fact, the neuro-oncologists at Duke totally gave me grief. I still remember when we were doing the consult, when they're like, "Hey, you need to redo your surgery," I was like, "Well, what about my clients? I need to see clients." That's what I told them. I'm still like, what was I thinking?

Michael: Is that just because the nature of the business, particularly at that time, was so transactional? It's like, my income's zero if I'm not seeing my clients. I have to see my clients.

Meredith: Yeah, it did. I feel this obligation, I think a lot of us do to our clients, and we care about them, and I knew that they wouldn't really...they would support me, and they did, but it's still... It's just kind of how I'm wired even now. We have to shut the business off sometimes and I still was thinking about it then. And that's when the neuro-oncologist is like, "You need to focus on your health right now." I was like, "Okay." So there's a lot of things that were happening in that time that really made me reflect back.

Michael: So, did you tell clients? How much of this situation did you communicate to them?

Meredith: I did because actually my assistant quit on me while I was amidst radiation at Duke.

Michael: Because she's just not sure if there's going to be a job here much longer? That...

Meredith: Probably. I don't know.

Michael: ...dynamic?

Meredith: Yeah. I mean, she was getting paid. Yeah, and I wasn't there to oversee stuff and...Yeah, I don't begrudge her that, but I mean, it was just one more thing to deal with at that time. And so...

Michael: So how much do you communicate to clients? How far down that path did you get with them?

Meredith: So when I would get an email or a phone call, I would have one of my agent friends deal with it. They handled it for me.

Michael: Well, so which which parts are you seeing? Because you said you were seeing clients through as well.

Meredith: Okay. Right, absolutely. So once I was amidst chemotherapy, I'm running meetings normally. I'm just not running at the pace. And this was amidst chemotherapy, but amidst the surgeries and radiation, that was where I was just doling emails and calls out because that's what...we weren't texting in 2005. So that's where I had friends handling stuff for me. But 2008, again, I was seeing clients. I couldn't run the calendar that I had been running before.

Michael: Okay. So I guess indirectly one of the benefits of being in large-term insurance environment, there's lots of agents in a local office. There are other people to call upon to help.

Meredith: Yes, but I'm a little discerning from a skill level, is a nice way of putting it, who I wanted to do that. And there's a gentleman named Andrew Hill, highly competent guy, and I trust him implicitly, and he did a great job. And a lot of people, just by nature of this crazy diagnosis, from a client standpoint, were willing to sit on hold for a bit if they needed to, as long as things weren't completely falling apart. I didn't have a complicated business at that point, certainly not to the degree that I do now.

Michael: So, you said as you came out of this on the other end, business was starting to grow and tick up. I'm just wondering more like, what was going on? What was changing? What was what was new Meredith on the other end of this that was making it grow in new and different ways?

Meredith: I think the world of becoming the kind of advisor that I wanted. I felt like I was more open to doing it. Remember, I had just affiliated in 2004 and started charging. And that time, again, compared to other advisors, wasn't a bad planning fee. I was charging $500,000.

Michael: But that was sizable.

Meredith: Well, it was then.

Michael: Yeah. Well, almost 20 years ago. Yeah.

Meredith: Yeah, it was. And especially given that I was, what, 30 years old, that was a decent size fee. And so I was really able to start running from there and without distractions, relatively speaking, in my personal life and things like that. So I started growing my AUM a little bit and started seeing bigger clients. But really, I'll also say, I had growth, but not what I think of now as substantial growth. Within the environment that I was in, I had good production, so to speak. But ultimately, over time, I needed to be around other people so that it could really get much bigger production, see bigger clients with bigger problems. I do have a bit of a technical side, again, having an engineering undergrad. And while we don't judge her, my COO, she has a civil engineering degree from Clemson. So you have 2 analytical women running the practice. And I think with hiring her, that was my next big step to be able to grow things and really thinking about people differently in my organization.

Michael: So do you recall, I guess, where your production was, where revenue was at this point as you're starting to do this hiring and reinvestment?

Meredith: Here's what I'll tell you, is I remember when the markets went down in 2008, it didn't impact me because I had enough insurance as a percentage in the practice to overcome the 37% to 50% loss in AUM. And I thought, well, damn, diversifying revenue streams, I'm just brilliant. When in actuality, I just didn't have a lot of AUM is really what it came down to at that time. So maybe 200, maybe 200 of REV, maybe less than that. As an individual, I've always invested a lot back into my business. Year 2, year 3 in the business, I hired an assistant because I always believed that, A, I had the luxury to take a loss because at that time I had a husband who had good income and I thought I could grow my revenue faster the quicker I hired. And so I've always wired like that.

Michael: That's part of why I was wondering. You said earlier you had a spouse's income which helps to keep the household stable while you're reinvesting in the business early. By now, I think the divorce has happened, so you have to make reinvestment decisions as a single mom at this point.

Meredith: Yeah, so I had a partner at this point, but she wasn't earning anything. So there was one income. There was one income, which kind of also leads...I know we'll get there around the niche. So I had not been the breadwinner in my first marriage and I was in my second relationship or marriage. And so that also gave context to what we do. So yeah, I had to figure it out. I didn't take home a lot, but I was motivated to grow things because I definitely had a vision. I've been listening to you from the get. I remember when Matt Oechsli started really doing a lot of stuff on how millionaires hire advisors. Tom Stanley, who wrote "Millionaire Next Door," he lives in Cobb County right here in Atlanta. And so I had been studying all of that early in the industry. I became really fascinated with practice management. So I just happened to be an entrepreneur, but that just is an advisor right now. And so I had been very committed to putting stuff back in the business, even if it meant not living in the big, idealic, suburban metaphorical house that I had been when I was in my first marriage.

Michael: So what does the business look like as you're now going through this stage? I mean, it sounds like the AUM side is is still very small, but that's where you're focusing the growth.

Meredith: I've always been and I've always identified as a planning practice first, always. I've listened to you long enough, and I know from personal experience, my margins are not going to be what all my friends are that are just running money, or even those that are just writing massive life insurance. But fundamentally with who I am as a person, I was running, and still am, a planning shop first. So the financial planning fees were always critical and still remain very critical to the P&L because it always started there. I'm not the person you call if you have a rollover or if you want to write a term policy. I can send you to somebody that does that. But we're doing the plan, and then the implementation, of course, is an offshoot of that. And that's how I've always been wired.

Michael: So what were you doing to start...I guess I think of it like moving up market, you said you were getting bigger clients with bigger problems. Is there something you were doing to make that shift?

Meredith: That's a great question. It was organically happening at this point and really until about 5 years ago when I started creating minimums. I should have been doing some of those things before, but I was consistently getting the $250,000, half a million, $100,000 account, and then did a lot of that, but was still doing planning agreements and had terrible margins around it. But I was doing, at that point, what I thought that I loved. And then I would have ancillary insurance annuity products to meet what I knew to be revenue minimums to hit thresholds that I created for myself.

At this point, I knew that I needed somewhere between 5 and 10 grand per household. And so I would back in, Michael, to, okay, if that's what I need, I'm making revenue estimates around size of accounts and then supplementing with insurance, annuity, products, because it's still what I would characterize as mid-market, upper mid-market. So it's households that have $200,000, $250,000 of household income. So definitely not where I am now. But that's what it was, and there was more of a need for insurance products at that level. So I wasn't doing million-dollar accounts, wasn't doing SMAs at that point. It was more wrap stuff earlier on that account size, but it was slowly...I was learning the business. I was growing.

And I guess with where I was in that path, I look back and I don't have regrets, but I wish I had sought out better...because I didn't have mentors. And I have a real... that's one of the things I talk about in business quite a bit, not just in the industry, but with friends. It was old white guys that didn't have the education that I have and their offering was very different than who I was and where I wanted to go. And I had to figure a lot of this stuff out for myself and listen to stuff that you put out, stuff that Oxley was putting out. Joe Lucas is my coach now. I've been listening to him for years. And so that's how I was learning the business of advisory. And that's always what's interested me. I love being an advisor, but much less than being the business owner and how to figure this out and how to figure growth out.

Michael: So I want to come back from this goal that you knew you needed to be somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 of revenue per household. So it sounds like that comes back from, because I know how much planning stuff I'm doing and what it has to add up to, so then I...well, I guess I figure I can charge the client $5,000, $10,000 planning fee, but not a lot of us do that. And that can be harder to do an insurance environment. So we're going to do whatever combination of things they need to make sure ultimately that I'm getting compensated for the depth of the planning work I'm doing. Is that another way to think about it?

Meredith: Right. Yeah, that is. And you have to remember this was well before eMoney and MoneyGuidePro. The tech was way more antiquated and I was having to spitball. And with where I play right now, if somebody has financial independence, it's a little bit tougher on the insurance annuity side. And I've seen that side of my P&O. It's just gone down by virtue of where I'm playing now, where then it's very appropriate. You're writing a boatload of term insurance and yeah, you're...

Michael: Because you're actually working with younger folks still in their working years. Often with families and children and very traditional insurance needs.

Meredith: Yes. Right. Yeah, and how are you going to get paid on, at that time, your 3 grand Roth contribution in the A share? That's not going to pay the mortgage.

What Lead Meredith To Create Minimums And Find Her Niche? [41:58]

Michael: So, what led to this shift that you said 5 years ago you started to create minimums?

Meredith: So I'm going to back up a little bit because it kind of leads to niching. Do you mind if we start there?

Michael: Okay. Yeah, please. Well, as everyone knows, I'm always game for a good niche story. Yeah, please go right ahead.

Meredith: Yeah. Sure. So I had been systematically seeing a lot of women in my practice that were outearning their male partner. and I was noticing on how decisions were being made financially. And if she was outearning him, she would want to involve him in the decision. We can talk about gender roles and all that stuff too because that plays into this. And I was intrigued where it was the other way around, he wasn't as apt to involve her to the same degree. And I was seeing this over and over again. And so I happened to be sitting at my RAA's conference. This had to be 2014, 2015 by this point. And I had been receiving the newsletter for Dorie Clark who has a brilliant business mind, nothing to do with advisory whatsoever, written a ton of articles for HBR, Forbes, Big Speaker, everywhere. And one of the books she had written was called "Stand Out." And the point of the book was, in a sea where everybody "looks like you," how do you make your business stand out? And that just, for whatever reason at that time, it appealed to me. And she had an online course. I'm sitting at this RAA conference and I buy an online course, which is very...Go ahead.

Michael: Is this because she's speaking at the conference? You're hearing her on stage and saying, this is amazing and I'm going to buy her course on my phone…?

Meredith: No. No, she was promoting her new course. And at that time, remember, there weren't a lot of online courses either. In 2010, I was ready to do something different because I knew that I needed to stand out. Again, at that point in time, this is over 10 years ago, how do I really do something different?

Michael: But notably, you started in the late 1990s. We're 15-plus years into your career at this point. You've been doing it for a while.

Meredith: I am. Right. And even now, I'm like, why was I not so, so far ahead? I think about this a lot and I'm like, well, if you didn't go through those things, you wouldn't be where you are right now. And I always look at who I surrounded myself with. Why did I not seek out better mentors? Again, we can sit here and ponder all day long what-ifs. But I am where I am. But so I bought Dorie's course, which was called Becoming a Recognized Expert. And this course was, again, in essence, how to stand out, and the framework of her idea around these 3 things. Number 1, how to create an incredible network. Number 2, creating content. Well, that sounds like old hat now, but remember this is still 10 years ago. So creating content, and then creating social proof. And so I thought, well...

Michael: Network, content, social proof.

Meredith: You got it. Exactly. And so I thought, well, I've got a network. I graduated from Leadership Atlanta, which is kind of the first leadership program through all the chambers that began during civil rights. It's a kind of BFD here in Atlanta to be a part of that and I thought I was networked, but I learned quickly because of Dorie that I wasn't And so I began to work on my network. I began...Go ahead.

Michael: What was wrong with your network? You were in Leadership Atlanta. What was what was not networked about the network that you thought was networked but wasn't?

Meredith: There wasn't enough. There wasn't enough because I hadn't been seeing enough people during my career. I had been organically waiting for people to come. I mean, yeah, I had referrals and some of that, but I wasn't out there just creating crazy amounts of relationships. And so what I did was I created a luncheon series called Interesting Women Leaders in the ATL. And I curated it and had it 2 to 3 times a month. And I invited literally senior leaders in all the big fortunes because Atlanta and Dallas has pretty much all the headquarters, it seems like. I invited women heads of government and heads of large nonprofits. And I curated a lunch and it started live before COVID, eventually went virtual. And I built...I mean, I am known in Atlanta now with having the biggest, tightest women's network. And that's what I sought out to build.

Meredith's "Interesting Women Leaders" Luncheon Series [47:14]

Michael: So tell me more about just this, I guess, luncheon series, what you did, how you built it. So, who gets invited? How do you actually get senior leaders at big fortunes to show up for your luncheon?

Meredith: Yep. So we curated it. Spent a lot of money with all my VAs. I had gone through LinkedIn and the way I started it is I started with my Leadership Atlanta alumni that I knew and I would fill the room with that. And I didn't want more than 6 people because I wanted an intimate setting and I would moderate a series of questions.

Michael: 6 people in the audience?

Meredith: No, 6 people at the lunch.

Michael: Okay. Okay, the whole thing. So this isn't like, come for a lunch, grab from the buffet, there's some people on stage and...

Meredith: No.

Michael: ...25, 50, 100 people in the audience.

Meredith: No.

Michael: The whole thing is 6 people in the room.

Meredith: Right. I wanted intimacy. I wanted to ask some questions that would allow people to connect deeply and to be able to connect after and meet people that they would never normally be able to meet.

Michael: Okay, so, it's not like one person's the speaker and everyone comes to a lunch-and-learn style thing it sounds like. The point is all 6 people in the room are curated folks that would be very powerful to get to talk and meet with each other.

Meredith: Yes, exactly. And for me to meet and become a connector, a very high-level connector over a period of time. I had over 300 women in Atlanta go through my luncheon series over the course of 7 years.

Michael: So help me understand the outreach, the ask, how does it work to get people to show up for this?

Meredith: So first I started, again, with the people I knew and they were going to come. And then we had built a list. And so we would still invite some cold people. I had an FAQ and we made sure that we had a list of everybody that had already been. So I wanted to create FOMO. Everybody relates psychologically to FOMO. So if these people have come, I have to get there. And so with the cold people, that was the approach we took, but we also asked everybody that participated that they replace themselves. So we created an email so they would do an email introduction and they would replace themselves with either 1 to 3 people. So I was able to keep it...My VAs were managing all the inventory and we never knew who was going to come to which date, but it was all...it was highly curated and just some really big names and people that over time I've become friends with.

And we would ask that to keep the quality of conversation on equal footing, I didn't need them hiring their mid-level manager...or bringing or asking their mid-level manager to do it. So, and based on the conversations and the luncheon with the questions that I would ask, which you're going to ask me what the questions were in a minute, they would know, you need to find somebody really good that's going to enjoy something like this and that has done a lot of really cool things.

Michael: So how long is the lunch itself? Is this traditional come for an hour, hour-and-a-half kind of thing?

Meredith: Yeah. It was an hour. It was an hour. Nobody has time to do...if you're doing big stuff, you got an hour. It was a low-level commitment. It's a one-time thing. I was looking to really, again, my point in building a different network around women and women breadwinners was to focus on, again, leaders and then same caliber government, heads of bigger nonprofits, and then in corporate, doing big things. you

Michael: And so now help us understand, what literally are you talking about at this luncheon? What questions were you asking?

Meredith: Yeah, so I would always first ask about personal/professional background, and I would always go first. You've got to throw in all the interesting tidbits. You heard a little bit of mine in the beginning of this. There's other interesting things about me too, by the way. I'm not cancer chick and I don't ever want to be labeled that, but...So we would start personal/professional background, and then we would talk about the biggest win that they had had the previous year. And then the final question was the big goal that they had on their board for the year that we were in, what they were trying to do, and what the rest of us could do to support them in that. So you get to really intimate stuff very quickly. And what was so fascinating was not just the physical lunch, because all this was during COVID too. I found a tech called CIRCL.ES, C-I-R-C-L-dot-E-S, that a YPO member founded that very surprisingly allowed...it would put everybody in literally a circle, not like the Muppet Show Zoom square thing, and it allowed for much deeper, more intimate conversations than we would ever had live.

Michael: So what changes? Why was it so much more powerful, circle video than live?

Meredith: Because of, A, the depth of the questions and that technology, that's what it's meant for. Originally was built for therapists and guidance counselors and education. You're not sharing screens and going through decks. It's meant for more intimate conversations. It's hard to explain until you demo it. I knew that I needed something different. I moved 2 circles during COVID. I needed something different. It just allowed people...some of the stuff that was said in there is...and you don't know anybody. So it's just fascinating to see people get that vulnerable that quickly. And I'm used to it because in EO and Forum, we're taught to do that, but most of these people were not.

Michael: So was it literally just those 3 questions?

Meredith: Yup, yup. And you got 6 people.

Michael: I have 6 people, everyone takes a few minutes for each, and an hour blows by really, really fast.

Meredith: Oh yeah, and then what we would do is we do a photo and put that on LinkedIn, we tag everybody so everybody was able to connect after. And the amount of business that was done with people after was absolutely fascinating to see that happen.

Michael: So how does this turn into business for you?

Meredith: Thank you for asking that, Michael. So I would send a book, an HBR book, Women in Leadership HBR book and a handwritten note after, and would follow up, and ultimately I'd get a one-on-one, is what I would do and explain more what I do.

Michael: And you've earned enough in this relationship that at least you get the the proverbial at-bat, "We had such a great interaction. Would it be okay if we had a follow-up meeting where I could just share a little bit more about what I do in case that's helpful for you?"

Meredith: Yep, exactly.

Michael: Okay. And some percentage of those turned into business in the good old-fashioned way?

Meredith: That and I've gotten known around women and money in Atlanta. Because between those asks and people just knowing, and if somebody was asking about it, I would get the referral. I get more referrals from non-clients than I do clients because of all of this that I built. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but as I really started running these luncheons at a rapid rate, that's what was starting to happen, and it still happens that way with how I've created that network around town.

Meredith's "3-2-1" Articles [55:59]

Michael: So, so your comment earlier from the Dorie Clark framework was your 3 things: network, content, social proof. So I get the network part here now. So were there other things you're doing at the same time for the content prong and the social proof prong?

Meredith: Well, I was, I was...

Michael: Or the networking thing is working so good, we're just sticking with this.

Meredith: No, no, no, no, no. I was building all of it. Why stop at one, right? So I continued...I think a lot of us did during COVID. We were just trying to do anything we could to get stuff out there. And so I was producing a lot of video content at that time. I haven't done a lot since, but that's when I started writing, actually. And I know you've picked up a couple of my stuff. But what was really interesting was I think that the nature of this business is there's definitely a math side to it. And listen, I do math well, like the best of us. But after time, it gets boring and you're using one part of your brain. And I gave myself permission to start writing again. And it felt...I don't want to say exhilarating because that's a little melodramatic, but it felt really good to begin to start writing on topics that I had thoughts on and it just became like a practice thing. And I would use that...in essence, that's content, so that was...but it was helpful for me and to get that stuff out there via LinkedIn. I've got a bunch of articles on Medium. I now write for Forbes. So it just became part of what I did and I have certain days that I enjoy just going into that zone for 2 hours. And I also write my own newsletter. I don't use any canned anything, and it's named after James Clear's newsletter. So I do a 3-2-1, so 3 ideas, 2 quotes, and 1 question, so...and as I'm reading different things, learning different stuff, I'm able to take where my head is and get that stuff out there. So writing in terms of content became just as important to me at that time and to learn a new skill.

Michael: I'm just wondering, what are you writing about? What topics? Because you're saying, I'm writing about things that are interesting to me. What kinds of things are we talking about?

Meredith: One of my articles is called "Retirement for High Achievers is Malarkey," because I don't believe...My experience has been that people in senior leadership don't truly retire. Especially women, they go sit on paid public boards, they consult, they maybe do a side hustle. And so things that were contrarian, I wanted to start putting ideas out, so to speak. That's one of my articles. I've got literally probably a hundred different articles. I think the one you picked up was around planning in terms of living expenses if you've made more money than your parents, and how are we thinking about how much we're sending back to either families or... I'm sure many people in here have had this happen. Again, we've done better than our parents have financially. Mom and Dad didn't have the assets to cover a longer-term healthcare event, nor did they have insurance. So typically the oldest daughter, it's batter up, you're going to have to start writing checks to cover care. And so how do we think about that in a financial plan for our generation and having family meetings and beginning to think about financially providing for our parents?

Michael: So this I'm...These are still articles, topics that relate back to this working with high-powered women, high-powered, high-income women and stuff they're dealing with.

Meredith: Yep. Exactly.

Michael: So high achievers that probably aren't going to retire. You're the high earner who's a successful executive, Fortune 500, and makes more than your parents did and also happens to be the oldest sibling, which means you're the oldest daughter and everyone's looking at you when mom and dad get sick. So let's have that conversation.

Meredith: Yep. Yeah, so I was doing it with my avatar in mind, but there was other stuff that I would do just trying to...that might've been topical. I wrote a lot of stuff during COVID around women's role. A lot of us, I say us because I didn't have to do it, but had to become educators if you had young kids. And what happened to women that had to take a step back that might've been a VP or an SVP because, all of a sudden, maybe their male spouse was working and so they had to learn...I mean, hell, my son was taking PE at his fancy-schmancy Atlanta private school online on Zoom. So it was Zoom PE.

Michael: Is it like guided jumping jacks?

Meredith: Yeah, it was...the whole thing's comical, but a lot of moms had to do that, and getting back to the same point in their career trajectory is not going to happen when you take a year break. So stuff like that that was topical to my avatar I would write about.

Michael: And how long do you write? I mean are you...well, long-form like our crazy long-form content? Are you short snippets? It's just, I'm going to put out a paragraph to stir an idea and we move on? What?

Meredith: It's longer. Yeah, it's longer format, except for my 3-2-1, which I've got that down to a rhythm. Then when I get ideas, I try to put those on one Word document so that when I'm in creative time, I could just batch it and crank out 3 3-2-1s at one time. All my quotes that are in my area and where I put all my ideas, I can pull those off and figure out how to do that. That's shorter and it's a quick read. I send that out on Fridays.

Michael: Okay, so the 3-2-1 is a weekly thing.

Meredith: Yeah, I've reduced it just because we were trying to A/B test it to see eyeballs. And so we found that we got more eyeballs when I did it maybe every other week. So I try not to send to my email list more than 2 things in a week. So if we don't have like a webinar going on that we're trying to promote, I'll push out a 3-2-1, or my VA team will.

Michael: So, I get taking these and publishing them on LinkedIn or sending them to your own email list. I think you said you're also publishing on Forbes. So how did that come about?

Meredith: Well, I'm doing pay-to-play. So if you're going to be a Forbes contributor, that's a whole 'nother animal and I don't have capacity to do that from a time standpoint. I think I have the knowledge and the ability to write to do it, but with their finance counsel, it's a low bar to be able to submit articles. But I write enough to where we rarely have edits. And so, whatever the hot topic is that I'm feeling like I want to write about, I'll send it to Forbes and then they edit.

Michael: But you have to pay them to publish on the platform?

Meredith: At the beginning of the year. Yeah.

Michael: So can I ask, what's the cost to do that?

Meredith: It's like $1,000. It's like $1,000, maybe $1,800. It's not a high bar.

Michael: Okay. And the appeal is just, I can put this out on LinkedIn or other places, but Forbes has its own traffic, its own visibility. Forbes is still a name unto itself, so it shows well to say I'm published on Forbes. Is that the...

Meredith: Yeah. Yeah, that's the social proof.

Michael: ...justification for the $1,000?

Meredith: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's your social proof right there. That's one of them.

Michael: So I was going to ask about that is the third prong here. So you've talked about the networking and how you built with the luncheons, the content, and how you built with articles. So then what was the social proof portion of this formula?

Meredith: So I was writing for Forbes, it's doing a TED Talk, which I did, and also guest lecturing at both Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business and Emory's Goizueta Business School. So I feel like I've satisfied that thing too. And Dorie's argument around social proof is, obviously by having some of that, it makes it easier walking in that you've done X, Y, and Z and it looks nice in a bio before you come on as a speaker.

Michael: So you said writing for Forbes, guest lecturing at Georgia Tech and Emory. So is that an ongoing thing or you did that at one point?

Meredith: No. I did that at one point. And because I went to Georgia Tech, I'm still very involved over there with alumni stuff. And whenever I can give back and speak to groups, I try to do that.

Michael: So what do you do to open that door just for anyone who's never tried to get guest lecturing opportunities?

Meredith: Well, you have to know somebody and see if they're looking for speakers and see if the professors are looking for that. And sometimes there's other groups. I found this one particularly funny. There was an undergrad group called the Society of Women in Business, and these were undergrads. And so being a mom, I had my super secret spy agenda. My son at this time was a junior or senior, and he's not a math guy, so I knew he wasn't going to tech, but he had never been on the campus to tour, but I was going to be speaking in the business school, so I had him meet me over there. I didn't tell him what I was doing or that I'd be speaking or this was only women. And so he showed up there to support me, God bless, and we're doing it. He's like, "Mom, this is only girls." I was like, "I know, that's why you're here." So he watched his mom do her thing on the stage, and that felt really cool for me.

Michael: Very cool.

Meredith: Yeah, he was at my TED Talk too, so that was also cool.

Meredith's Experience With TED [01:07:07]

Michael: Well, and then, so that's not a light thing. So TED Talk?

Meredith: Yes.

Michael: So what is this and how did this come about?

Meredith: Right, so this is a whole other animal. So this had been on my list for a long, long time. And understanding how it works is very, very black box. And I did not sign an NDA on how it works, but short of that, it's complicated. They don't tell you in advance, but I had... There's a TEDx Women franchise here in Atlanta. And I had hired a consultant 2 years ago, or before I got it that I wanted to get one because there's people that can actually do that. They know how to apply to all the different venues with your idea. The first thing is most people in this industry, it's not what you think. You can't come in with your great portfolio idea around alpha and beta. They do not care about that. They want something that...in fact, mine was too complicated because I originally went in around power dynamics and relationships and what money does with that. And they're like, too complicated, too complicated. But I had originally gotten in with that.

And by the way, my network, there are some people that happen to be on that board for TEDx Women and they were able to help vouch for me. So this speaks back to that framework. My network helped me there. I got in to be able to pitch and I pitched and she told me no, this isn't going to work. So I went back to my consultant. I'm like, "I got rejected. I'm not used to getting rejected," except in our business. This isn't a person with $5 million telling me no. And so she's like, "That's okay. This is auditioning. Go back and do it again." I'm like, "I can do that. I don't give up. Let me get an at-bat again." And so I went back, tweaked it slightly with what she had said. And the organizer, I didn't realize she had my cell phone, she ended up calling me right after and she said, "Yours is really good, but it's not going to work for this because I think men need to hear this too." And I'm like, "You're not wrong."

And the next thing I knew, a month later, I got an email saying I got into TEDx Women. And I was like, what in the world? Because she had basically told me no on the phone and that it would be for another regular TED event. And so I was part of it. And the way TED works is whoever the organizer is, they're going to have a theme, and then they are going to curate the talks that fit their theme. And so they're producing this massive show and everything interconnects. And so that's what it was, and I got to tell you...and I haven't done as much speaking as you, Michael, but I've done a lot. I had spoken at The Wall Street Journal Women in the Workplace series not 2 or 3 years before. I'm like, this is going to be cake.

Well, what they don't tell you is there are no teleprompters. You can't hold note cards. You have to rote memorize every single word. Every single word. And you were put...they gave me a coach. Everybody had a coach. And mine got cut down from originally 2000 words to maybe 300 words. When I say the talk was decimated, it was decimated. And it got switched from Power Dynamics and Relationships to How to Have Better Conversations With Your Partner Around Money. And essentially, I'm being handled, and that's fine.

Michael: Your whole speech, your whole presentation is 300 words.

Meredith: Yes, it was very short.

Michael: A couple of paragraphs.

Meredith: Right, right, exactly. But it's my coach who's reporting to the organizer. They're all meeting. And then there's like 6 of us, and we're all living in our own bubbles. And then we have to go practice in front of small groups that the organizer has organized. And I come back to it is rote memorization. When is the last time we've had to memorize anything, the freaking third grade? Here's the Declaration of Independence. I don't know. And so...

Michael: I guess on the plus side it's a little bit easier when they cut you down to only 300 words.

Meredith: Yes, but still it's not. But I guess it would be. So the talk was really good and my coach was really instrumental. And I've had speaking coaches before that I've hired, but this guy was amazing. And in fact, I'll hire him again later this year to build a bigger talk, and that's another podcast too. But the thing about it is I had to literally take off, I had to clear my calendar like 2 weeks before to prepare because there's different layers to speaking when you have to memorize. There's the rote memorization. Now you're bringing in who you are, the hand gestures, the intonations, and they were handling my intonations, like where to emphasize. I mean, this is a very produced show. And so, I sat up literally in my son's room and did that thing something in the order of 300 to 400 times. Yeah, the talk was 5, 7 minutes. And it was really hard and it was an incredible... I'd put it up there in the top 10 experiences in my life. I learned a lot about myself.

And then the crazier part was the talk was at...they had TEDx Women at the Center for Puppetry Arts here in Atlanta. And so I did it the first time and they told me not to wear long earrings. They did, because you get the headset with the mic and the lav, you know the drill with speaking. And I didn't know it, I couldn't tell it, but apparently my earrings were hitting the lav. And so I'm coming off this massive adrenaline rush. I do the talk, don't mess up too much, but wasn't perfect. And I'm literally recovering, coming off the adrenaline, sitting down, and they're like, "There was a technical problem. You need to redo it. Do you want to redo that now or do you want to redo it at the very, very end?"

Meanwhile, the head of all of agency from New York Life and 3 SVPs have taken a private plane. They're sitting out in the Center for Puppetry Arts knocking on the door trying to talk to me and I'm just a stress ball. I'm being told I have to go redo this thing and I'm like, "Okay, put me in, coach. Let's do this now, let's just get it over." And so I redid it, really didn't get to spend time with anybody that had flown in, and nailed it. And my coach was right there in the front row with my family, so that was really fun. And the organizer, she's become a friend over time and she's like, "I got to tell you, I almost wasn't going to let you redo it." And that's actually made me kind of mad since, but I did redo it. It worked out well. And I will tell you in the essence of memorizing, the people at Lifetime Fitness looked at me a little strange because there were a number of mornings that I would go in super early on the treadmill and just give my talk with all my hand gestures and the whole 9.

Michael: And so this is now up on the TED...

Meredith: Oh, yeah

Michael: ...website? So your...?

Meredith: Yep. In fact, it should be in your show notes. I sent you guys a link.

Michael: All right, so I guess for those who are listening and want to check it out, this is episode 377. So if you go to kitces.com/377, we'll have a link in the show notes for the TEDx talk. Yeah, all right. So then I got to ask, I feel like, the obvious question. So you get a talk out on TEDx, does the phone start ringing?

Meredith: No, it's social proof. It's in my...

Michael: Ah.

Meredith: I know. no, no, no, that's not how these things work. With marketing, so social proof is never going to bring in revenue. But I will tell you that had I not...if I didn't have some of these things, it's maybe more 'referrable'. And so, and there are really no advisors that have done a TEDx before when I did because the big idea is what's so hard to come up with. Because it's not something that's financial advisory. It's sort of adjacent. It's money adjacent is how to think about it. I had to kind of back into some of this.

Michael: So, now, just help me link these together. I feel like we've talked about Dorie's framework. There's the network, which is the luncheons. There's the content, which is the articles. There's the social proof. Just sounds like it's a little bit of a blend, like I do some of the lecturing things in the TEDx once so I can put it on the official resume, and we're done with it. The Forbes stuff is at least a little more ongoing because I'm writing anyways for the content, so I might as well Forbes it for the credibility. I guess I'm just trying to visualize how this quite all comes together to make clients show up.

Meredith: Right. So it's not tactical, it's more strategic is what I will say. And then I work the tactical stuff just like the rest of us with client referrals. I'm out networking. Again, I get more referrals from my network than I do from my clients at this point because of more recently how I've started moving significantly up market.

I finished the luncheon series. I'm getting ready to start a women's dinner series for women enterprise-level entrepreneurs. So I'm very involved in EO or Entrepreneurs' Organization. And so, I do a lot of...I have a business advisory model that we use, not just traditional financial planning. And so with my Women Entrepreneur Network, I'm getting ready to start a dinner series called Rich Conversations.

Michael: And so, is it the same style as what you were doing already, just now we're going after women entrepreneurs instead of women in leadership?

Meredith: Yeah, and there were a lot of entrepreneurs in my Interesting Women Leaders luncheon, but the dinner series is focused on enterprise-level women entrepreneurs that typically are going to be above $8 million to $10 million of rev.

What Does Meredith's Advisory Firm Look Like Today? [01:18:36]

Michael: So now bring us to present of just what does the advisory firm look like today of clients, or assets, or revenue, however you evaluate.

Meredith: Right. Yeah. Sure. So I'm just over a million in revenue and about 60% of the revenue is from AUM, 15% are in financial planning agreements, and I am on your high end. I do charge $1,000 a month on financial planning. So I know relative to many people listening, it's higher, but I'm constantly sitting in CPA calls and constantly sitting in estate planning calls and I feel like we earn every dime on that. And remember, we don't sell anything until we get done with the planning engagement. And then 25% is probably other ancillary stuff, whether it's insurance, annuities, splits with my other advisor, maybe some small retail stuff on the investment side.

What Has Surprised Meredith The Most? [01:19:41]

Michael: Okay. So as you've grown this journey, what's surprised you the most about building your advisory business?

Meredith: I got to say, I've been surprised that it's still so hard. We talk about, not just in advisory, but even in outside businesses, that $750,000 to $1.2 million is the chasm of death, then I'm squarely in it. And there are days where right now, I'm trying to bring on new advisors. And with our niche, we didn't really spend a ton of time on this, but it isn't just women, but my other advisor, it's people of color. And so he works quite a bit with Black intergenerational wealth, and we're very committed to both of those markets. And so I thought that, hey, once I have the minimums that I do now...because I'm personally not working with anybody unless there's half a million dollars of household income or...

Michael: Of income? Not even just assets, of income?

Meredith: Yeah. Right, of income and/or a million of AUM. But again, I'm not doing one-off transactions. It all starts with the planning engagement. And again, we're charging a $1000 a month that first year.

Michael: And how many clients now overall?

Meredith: So, it's almost 25 years. So all in, there's probably around 120, but truly I have about 50 that are active, that I consistently try to do reviews with and that we're talking to. You have a lot of these old transactions from 15, 20 years ago that are paying 20 bucks a month in term insurance and there's just not much to do with them at this point. And what's funny is they still see me as who I was 20 years ago, and I'm a different advisor as all of us are.

Michael: And so what's the AUM base at this point, or the biggest portion of revenue?

Meredith: Yeah, yeah. Sure. It's about $80 million, plus or minus. It's not huge, but again, it's a decent size.

Michael: And so that's kind of the chasm challenge, like you're coming up on capacity limitations for you on your own. It sounds like you've had another advisor, but he's got his own clients that are separate from this base of yours.

Meredith: That's exactly right. So that's what we've been dealing with. And the other issue we've had, I have an integrator, so I have a COO, but we have 2 operations people that have reported to her. We had to bifurcate the roles because of the amount of insurance we still have on the books and are still doing. So there's an investment operations and there's an insurance operations. And the insurance ops person also oversees all the planning agreements. Where we've still been bumping up against capacity is my COO was having to run the planning. She's just wearing so many hats, it's been unsustainable. And so we literally just hired a director of planning to sit in all my meetings and Adam's meetings as well to do notes and to come back and, in the CRM, put that in there and assign all the activities to the team with what needs to be done. And we knew that was going to be a game-changer. I mean, I'm only a month into this and it's so phenomenal. That has changed my world.

Michael: Because you just don't have to worry about capturing all that stuff and getting it back to the CRM anymore.

Meredith: Right. Well, that and if we're on with a client, there's a little bit of theater in what we all do. And then when we're dealing with navigating in Zoom or Teams or whatever your jam is, it's like the sequence of the order of the documents we pull up and how do we tell the story? And if we have to navigate through eMoney to look at a quick scenario on the fly, there's a lot involved in that. And then, oh, by the way, make sure you capture all the detailed notes. And details are critical for people in operations. And I don't think of everything all the time. And that's been a gap for them is both me and my other advisor, we just haven't...I do great notes for an advisor, but for what they need is still not near. And so that director of planning is kind of the link between the advisor and the operations team and can be more nimble. Where I'm focused on rain-making and just with my top clients, showing up and doing my thing and telling the story.

What Has Been The Low Point Of Meredith's Growth? [01:24:41]

Michael: So as the firm's gotten growing over, it sounds like the past 10 years in particular, what's been the low point of the growth?

Meredith: Yeah. So I guess it was 2 years ago. Thought we had all of our seats figured out, the seats on the bus, had new people in operations and hired somebody to be that director of planning. And literally in a very short period of time, people were grossly underperforming and didn't know things. We completely hired 3 wrong people. And so we had to terminate 1 and 2 resigned, and the...Oh, Michael, it was bad. And if that's not worse, we all have a termination story. It's like having the college tequila story, but we all have a termination story. So my termination story, there was a protein shake that was thrown on the wall amidst the whole thing and screaming up and down, running up and down the hall to where the person in the building below or in the floor below came up to make sure that she wasn't being killed or something. So, it was crazy.

And you know what? I know a lot more about people now than I did before. We completely changed our recruiting process, completely changed how we create evolution, like a training point so that they can move up in the company and know what that looks like and what they need to be able to do from a learning standpoint. One of our core values is continuous learning. So it was really important to have that. So that was the low point and it wasn't that...it was a year or 2 ago. So it was tough.

Michael: So what did you change in your recruiting? What was the big miss or lesson learned of, I wasn't doing then and now I know?

Meredith: Right. So hired... didn't use a recruiter anymore because we weren't getting...I think we were just trusting that even with all the testing and everything that had been done, that that would be enough. But I think by us literally doing LinkedIn ads, having more resumes to choose from, I literally would do front-end interviews, the junior advisor would do front-end interviews before it even went to the integrator or the COO. And then she would talk to him, or talk to the candidate. And we like to joke that she's like the CIA. She can get stuff out of people that they don't even know that they're disclosing. And then if they got past the telephone or the Zoom interview, then they would meet with her live. And she, again, like every good integrator, the HR functions would roll up to her. Then we would just have to check that we're good to go. I'll tell you during that period with all those bad hires, I ran out of cash. I literally ran out of cash. That had never happened since I was early in the business. We call it FITFO in my office. We figure out the F out. We had to FITFO the situation. We got through it. We have the best team I've had in my 25-year career. We're just always trying to evolve.

What Does Meredith Wish She Could Tell Herself Earlier In Her Career? [01:28:10]

Michael: So what else do you know now you wish you could go back and tell you from 10, 20 years ago as you were earlier career?

Meredith: Around mentorship. I think it's...one of the things I live by is surrounding myself...The old Jim Rohn quote, "You're the average of the 5 people you're around the most." And I wasn't around the right people that were building businesses that I had aspired to have. I don't know that I knew what I aspired to have at that point. But I should have found...I wish I had found a mentor earlier on that was running an advisory practice like a business, even with how advisory looked back then. I didn't have that. And because of that, I do a lot of mentoring in the industry. And God help you if you're a woman in this industry. It didn't phase me at the time because I had gone to Georgia Tech. We used to say where the odds were good, but the goods were odd. And so I was used to being around a 3:1 ratio. So I just thought that was normal. But I just wasn't around what I aspired to be. And I wish I had had more mentors and I'd tell everybody, men or women, it's so critical in this business. And it's hard. It's still hard. Again, I ran out of cash.

Meredith's Advice For Younger Advisors [01:29:40]

Michael: So any other advice you would give younger, newer advisors trying to get their careers going today?

Meredith: I still think hire early. I mean, that still allowed me to create a trajectory and do not discount learning about practice management in the business of advisory. If you want to be an advisor, that's good and that's a concentration. But if you're trying to grow or want to build a firm, you better be just as astute or figure out how to create learning to be just as astute on the business side or hire somebody that eventually that will do it. But I think it's so critical.

What Does Success Look Like For Meredith? [01:30:22]

Michael: So as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success and just one of the themes that comes up is the word success means very different things to different people. And so you're on this wonderful path. You've crossed a million dollars of revenue. The business is in a very successful place by any traditional measure. So how do you define success for yourself at this point?

Meredith: For me, it's about having channels to be able to create impact. How I'm measuring impact has yet to be determined, but I personally, with who I am, I like to connect deeply with people, and that's fed me on the advisor side. The other key thing for me for success is not being bored. Again, I don't aspire to have 5 businesses like you do, my friend, but I've got to be doing other things other than just being an advisor to not get bored and to also have fun in that process. And I feel like I've been able to do a lot of that with how I've structured a lot of speaking engagements and some of these other things that we've talked about. That feeds my soul.

Michael: Very cool. Very cool. Well, thank you so much, Meredith, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" Podcast.

Meredith: Thank you, Michael.

Michael: Thank you.