#FASuccess Ep 412: 3X’ing The Business With No More Than 50 Great Clients By Hyperfocusing On Who You Can Add The Most Value For, With Anjali Jariwala

Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Anjali Jariwala: Website | LinkedIn
• FIT Advisors Client Onboarding Template – Download (PDF)
• #FASuccess Ep 079: Niching From The Start To Turbo-Charge $250k Of Recurring Planning Fees In Only 3 Years with Anjali Jariwala
• How To Better Attract Your Ideal Clients By Crafting A Specific Client Persona To Market To
• BLX Internship Program

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

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Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Anjali Jariwala, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Anjali: Hi, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael: I appreciate you joining us, or I should really say re-joining us because you were actually out for the podcast in the very early years now, one of the first 100 episodes more than 6 years ago with what at the time was, I thought, this incredible fast growth trajectory that you had had to the business. You were 3 years in, 35 clients, $250,000-plus of recurring planning fees with a $10,000 retainer fee. That's a big number for a lot of firms still, but particularly when we're getting going the first 3 years, and how you had done that getting really focused in on physicians and small business owners that you're working with. And so now, I know it's been 6 more years. The business has 3Xed its revenue. It's over $750,000 run right now. And the clientele has grown, but only, I'll put 'only' in air quotes, only to 45 clients.

And I find it fascinating because I think for almost any advisor out there, if you said, "Well, 6 years ago, I had $250,000 of revenue and 35 clients, and I have 3Xed the business revenue," everyone would just assume, "Well, clearly, you must have 3Xed the clientele as well. How's it going with 100 clients?" But that's not what happened. And this idea to me that there are opportunities to double and triple the revenue of the business without necessarily doubling or tripling the clientele, I think is a really interesting phenomenon and growth path that to me has always been out there, but we don't really talk about very much. And so, I'm excited to talk about how this business has evolved for you over the past 6 years that you have gotten to a point where you 3Xed the revenue and only slightly increased the total client headcount.

So, I think as we get started, I've obviously described a little bit of where the business is now, but just paint the picture for the advisory firm as it exists today so we just understand what the business is.

How Anjali Reached Her Ideal Target Clients Through Blogging And Podcasting [06:21]

Anjali: Sure. So, the business today, as you mentioned, is 45 client households. Those households, I would say 90% are personal financial planning clients, the other 10% is a combination of personal financial planning plus I take on an outsourced/virtual CFO role for that other 10%. My business is still virtual. So, we have clients in about 25 states now. I do not meet with anyone in person still like I did when I was on 6 years ago. And I would say that I've even more so leaned into my niche. So, almost every single client is in that kind of physician household with complex tax needs or small business owners who are in that $5 to $20 million of revenue range in their business.

Michael: Okay. And I'm just curious because this always comes up like why those 2 and why 2, and not like one in particular hasn't won out the other over the past 6 months.

Anjali: Right. It's a good question. So, I would say for the physician household kind of small business owner niches, it's honestly a recreation of my husband and I, to be perfectly honest. You've talked a lot about ideal client avatar. And for me, a lot of the work that I do in my firm is obviously number crunching and analysis like a lot of us do. But there's also the other element of it, which is the behavioral finance, the emotion around money, and how best do we connect with our clients to help them make progress. So, for me, I always felt like I could resonate with people where I really understood where they were at and how best to understand someone unless I'm going through the exact same things that they may be going through. So, I would say it wasn't like I intentionally set out to work with physician households because I had...my husband's a physician. I have some understanding.

And then I leaned more and more into the niche as the years went on because I realized that I just could really understand and resonate with physician households who are going through a lot of things that my husband and I were going through, especially during COVID, which we can talk about, as well as small business owners. As a small business owner myself, I understand a lot of the struggles that we have in terms of growing our business, sustaining our business, and doing so in a way in which we're also maybe raising kids and have a lot of other things on our plate that we're balancing. So, I think it was more like those were the types of people that were drawn to me and coming into my client base. And I took that as a way to not only build the practice in a very mindful way, but also align myself with people who are really excited to work with my team and I.

Michael: So, when you talk about leaning into this as a niche, I guess, what does that mean? What did you do, or change, or adapt, or lean in further to make this more focused than you already were in working predominantly with physicians and small business owners?

Anjali: Right. So, what was interesting was when I was on the podcast 6 years ago, I talked a lot about some of the marketing channels I was using, which a lot of them at the time were advertising on various physician blog sites. And interestingly enough, after the podcast episode came out, those channels got really flooded. And what happened was, originally, I was maybe 1 of 10 advisors. All of a sudden, I became 1 of 50 or 100 advisors that are listed on these sites. So, naturally, it was a lot harder for people to find me because there's just so many other similar advisors out there. So, I decided at that time that it was really important for me to develop my own marketing channels instead of relying on someone else's marketing channel. And that was a wake-up call because after...I was 3 years in. I was having pretty good growth. I was happy where things were at, and all of a sudden, everything plateaued. And I was still very much in growth mindset. And I really was struggling with like, "I don't understand, what do I do? How do I bring the right clients over?" Because I was starting to have prospect calls that just weren't a good fit or the price point didn't align with some of the people I was talking to.

So, I decided to create 2 different marketing channels at that time. One was I started a podcast, and then I also started a blog post. So, every week, I would have a piece of content come out, whether it was a podcast episode or another blog post. And what I did with those 2 channels was I really focused in on the topics that my ideal top 10 clients were going through that my team and I were helping. So, it was tax planning for physicians who are practice owners or 1099. I have a lot of physicians who also do real estate. So, we did a lot of episodes on real estate investing, how to get into that, what do you need to look for. So, I decided to take these channels and put out content where people could really understand what it was that I did and also to get to know me better. I like to lead with a lot of personal examples when I do my planning. And so, I thought it was helpful for people to really get to know me in a different way and through a channel so that when they decided that they wanted to set up a prospect call with me, they already had an idea of who I was, the type of work I do. And then that conversion process was just so much quicker because they already knew me. So, I think that was one of the things that I really leaned into was really developing a marketing channel that was going to be very catered to who I wanted to serve. And so, I didn't need that many prospects to come in because the conversion rate was so high. So, it was much more about quality of the people coming in versus quantity of the number of downloads I was getting per podcast episode.

Michael: So, as you queued this up, I guess, can you just give us some more examples? What is in practice? What kinds of things were you talking about?

Anjali: Sure. So, as you know, I have a tax background. So, I have a CPA on master's in tax. And I spent my first career working in tax at PwC. So, I led with a lot of my initial episodes regarding tax planning. So, I did episodes on how to do tax planning if you're an independent contractor or practice owner. I did year-end tax planning, beginning of the year tax planning. So, tax was a big component of a lot of those earlier podcast episodes.

Michael: But these are all in the lens of …for physicians, …for small business owners?

Anjali: Correct. So, I actually ended up doing separate ones for each. So, I did one that was more physician-focused, so like practice owners, independent contractors. And then I did one specifically focused around small business owners. There is overlap, but I think the issues and how structures are set up is different for each of those groups. So, I did a separate one on just small business owners and how to do tax planning for that. I also did others on small business owners, like how to read your financials, how to hire the right team, etc. And then I also did a lot of early episodes on more of the emotional aspects around money because that's the second thing that I noticed kept coming up in the client base that I was working with. A lot of my clients are children of immigrants, immigrants themselves, or there's just a lot of money trauma, or emotions around money that causes maybe heightened anxiety or inability for them to really process and make good financial decisions.

So, I did a combination of very, very technical episodes because you know me pretty well, I'm a very technical person. But I wanted to weave it in with also things that are not necessarily technical, but do have a component of planning. And that also brings out parts of my personality that people can get to know. Like, "Here's this very technical, competent person, but she also understands me as like another children of immigrants and what that means in terms of our upbringing and how our parents taught us about money, etc." So, I was very diligent and mindful in terms of each episode because many of us, time is so limited. So, I wanted to make sure every episode I was putting out there was very impactful and right on point so that it wasn't a wasted opportunity to connect with someone who was listening.

Michael: So, if you were framing this up with some differences in the content that the physicians have a bit of a different angle in the small business owners, you need the physician version and the small business owner version. Do you literally end up with 2 podcasts with 2 blogs? Is it one there's just content for each and you say in the title who it's for? How did you actually manage the 2 different audiences as you began expanding this as a marketing channel?

Anjali: Yeah, that's a great question. Some episodes were very specific to a certain niche. So, I have specific episodes that are X, Y, Z for physicians versus separate episodes for small business owners. But I would say a lot of the other content was more evergreen in which it would overlap with both. And 90% of my client base is still physician households. So, that's the main niche that I was and still continue to target. The small business owners have just come to me through word of mouth or they're physicians that have businesses. So, I kept content for that group, but it wasn't, I would say, the main focus of the marketing. The main focus was really this niche physician household with complex tax needs that I was really focusing on when I was creating the content.

Michael: And so then, how did you get it out? How do you literally build your blog readership, your podcast audience when you're trying to hone into this particular segment that you're looking to reach and connect with?

Anjali: Yeah, it's hard as anyone knows who's created marketing funnels. So, I hired a ghostwriter to help with the blog posts. And then obviously, I hired a team to help with editing the podcast episodes. And the ghostwriter was also the one who would summarize each of the podcast episodes so that we can put it on the blog as well. And then for email lists, I really just started with friends, family, and current clients. So, it was very, very small to start. Even now when I've gone back and looked at where my stats were on in terms of the podcast, I was probably having an average of 1,000 downloads per episode, which may seem like a lot, but anyone who has done a podcast knows it's very small, but that was enough for me. So, I tried really hard not to focus on the number of people listening to it because I always kept top of mind that my content is very niche-specific. So, I don't need a ton of listeners. I just need the right listeners to come in.

And so, from there, it just expanded. I also was very proactive on making sure to be on other people's podcasts, YouTube channels that were specific to my niche. So, a lot of those initial physicians that I advertised on their blog sites, a lot of them already had podcasts. So, I reached out to all of them individually and asked, "Can I come on your podcast and can you come on my podcast?" So, I did a lot of this, like, "Who else has a funnel and a channel that would align with who I'm trying to target?" And making sure that I can get on their marketing channel so that there's just more viewers and more listeners who I have exposure to.

Working With A Marketing Team And Expanding Her Content's Reach [18:26]

Michael: Interesting. So, tell me more about how you found other podcasts and channels to target, how you reached out to them to actually get them to do something reciprocal with you.

Anjali: Sure. What's interesting is that when you're super niche, the community ends up being pretty small. So, a lot of the physicians who I either advertised on their website or whatnot were people who had reached out to me in my prior 9-year career history of having my firm because they had heard about me, they saw me on White Coat Investor, whatever the case was. So, I already had a relationship with 4 or 5 of these individuals. And when I would ask, they were very happy to be on my podcast because they were also growing their listenership. So, they wanted someone who is a financial expert to come on and talk through their stuff. And then the swap was pretty easy. And then afterward, I would always ask them like, "Do you think that there's anyone else in the community who I should reach out to that would like to have me on their podcast?" So, I used my community that I had already built in terms of physicians who were also more in this blog-marketing-type space to see who else was out there. I would say maybe I was on 10 or 12 different podcasts, which isn't in the grand scheme of things that many, but that was enough to bring in a lot more listenership because I had all of those individuals on mine as well. So, it was really just picking who was the right fit, people I already knew, and then asking them, and leveraging their community to see who else I should reach out to.

Michael: Could you see a bump in listenership, subscribers, downloads to your podcast after you went on someone else's? Could you see it that way?

Anjali: Yeah. But as you know, the statistics and the tracking aren't as robust as I would like them to be, at least at the time when I was doing mine.

Michael: Yeah. For anybody who does podcasting for business, the data and analytics are painfully limited...

Anjali: It's terrible.

Michael: ...compared to what you can do with written content on a blog. Yes.

Anjali: Exactly. Exactly. And I just didn't have the bandwidth to do the manual tracking of it on a regular basis. I did have a marketing team, so that was helpful. So, they were high-level tracking those numbers for me. And luckily, the marketing team that I was using also worked with a lot of those physicians who had podcasts and blogs. So, that was another avenue I had because they would bring up people to me as well. They're like, "Hey, so-and-so would be a good fit to be on your podcast, and you would be a good fit on their podcast." So, that just naturally opened up more doors for me.

Michael: Let's see. You worked with the marketing team collectively in the niche who works with all the other people who are marketing to the same...

Anjali: Exactly. Hence the value of super niching.

Michael: Yeah. That's a cool angle. So, can I ask who did you work with for marketing, for ghostwriting? Who did you work with? How did you find them?

Anjali: Sophia Bera, who you know, she was working with this person, and she was actually...she's a journalist. So, she was like, "I think she would be a good fit for you. She would get your voice." She's also more technical in terms of how she writes. So, I think you should talk to her. So, that's how I found her. And then for the marketing firm, I want to say it was another fellow advisor who...now I can't think of which one specifically, who also is working with physicians. And we had a little physician-advisor group going. So, I kind of, I think, put feelers out there, and I'm like, "Is anyone using a marketing firm? If so, can you let me know who?" And so, one of that referral came through from that group. And I think that advisor was like, "Oh, she also works with a lot of these other physician podcasters and bloggers. So, she already knows the space well. So, see if that's a good fit."

And then obviously, I do my own diligence to interview them and make sure that they get my voice and they understand where I'm coming from because my whole premise in terms of when I was doing the podcast and the blog was that it would be a deep dive into the topic that I was discussing. And so, whether you are new to the topic, or you feel like you're somewhat of an expert on that topic, you would get something out of that episode because I would start really high level and then I would get really detailed as the episode went on. And so, I really wanted to make sure I'm highlighting both the technical aspects of how my brain works, as well as taking very complex topics and breaking it down in a way that's more easy to understand for a general audience.

Michael: And do you recall just what did it cost from the business end, like just to make these investments into ghostwriter marketing team, stand-up podcasts to get it going as a marketing channel?

Anjali: I want to say between podcast editing, ghostwriter, and marketing, it was probably running me like $2,000 to $2,500 a month, which is, at that time, not an insignificant amount of money for me. It's definitely the most I was spending outside of my team on a line item on my P&L.

Michael: Oh, I guess when you were with us originally and making the shift, you were $250,000 of revenue or a little higher. So, you talk about $2,000, $2,500 a month, it's like 10% of revenue...

Anjali: Exactly, which is a lot.

Michael: ...investment into marketing. Yeah, yeah, that is a very healthy-sized investment. When you look in the grand scheme at just a lot of businesses and industries, it's not uncommon to see total marketing sales spends at 10% to 15% of revenue. Usually, for most advisors is like a hard dollar line item. It jumps out pretty sharp at that point.

Anjali: Exactly.

Michael: So, how long did it take to get to 1,000 downloads an episode? How long did it take before you were seeing results with actual prospect opportunities?

Anjali: So, the 1,000 downloads an episode probably took over a year. And then the prospect opportunities took about, I want to say, 6 to 8 months. So it definitely was not immediate. But everyone who had a podcast or had done similar marketing channels to me warned me that it wasn't going to be instant, so that I needed to be patient, which I'm not a very patient person. But I tried to keep that top of mind when I was building out the podcast and everything to make sure that I was being reasonable in my expectations.

Michael: And this was ultimately...so, weekly content rotating between blog and podcast?

Anjali: Correct.

Michael: Okay.

Anjali: Yeah. With the intent that every week something was coming out. And then at the end of the month, my ghostwriter, she would put together the newsletter, which would essentially summarize all the content for that month and then any media mentions I was in.

Michael: Oh, interesting. So, separate monthly email was, "Here's our latest podcast episodes, here's our latest blog posts, and here's some media mentions."

Anjali: Exactly.

Michael: And the media mentions just for the implied credibility, social proof of just lightly bragging on yourself that I was in the media, like that was the essence of it?

Anjali: Pretty much. I'm not someone who's good about talking or bragging about myself. So, it's a way to be like, "Look, there are other reputable sources who have interviewed me or whatnot," and to be able to kind of push out more of that content out there.

Michael: Yeah. I remember early on when I had started doing some media PR activity and I had talked to a PR consultant or a PR and business consultant person who basically said like, "You're going to do the PR stuff because you're hoping that when your name appears in the media, people will see it and prospects will call." But the truth is almost no one calls a trusted financial advisor because of one random appearance in the media. But if you tell all your clients about it, they get really excited. They feel really proud that they've picked you, a wonderful expert who was featured in "The New York Times," and they end up referring you more and bragging on you if you tell them about the media exposure way more than you get the business from strangers who see you once in the newspaper, even though...

Anjali: That's a good point.

Michael: ...even though that's what we all wish would happen. You get it out there and the phone starts ringing. So, if you had this goal to turn this into business, were there things you did to try to actually turn it into business? Was there a call to action in the podcast or the blog?

Anjali: I did put the call of action both in the podcast and in the blog and in the newsletter since that was the original intent of those media channels. But it was at the end of the episode. And it's been a little bit of time, but I think I said something like, "If you think there's someone who'd be a good guest, here's where to reach out to. And if you would like to work with me, please visit me at this website." So, the blog also had...or the blog would have that kind of on...because it's on the website as well. And then I would have that in the newsletter so that there would be a call to action because as everyone has told me, when it comes to marketing, it is good to have that call of action so that there's purpose to what you're doing from a marketing standpoint.

Michael: And what was ultimately the structure, I guess, to the podcast, to the blogs? Were you writing long articles, short articles, or these 5-minute money updates, or these hour-long deep dives? What were you actually putting out as content that you found worked for you?

Anjali: So, my podcast episodes were 45 to 60 minutes. I was advised to make them shorter. I just didn't feel like I could get everything I wanted to get covered in that topic in a shorter amount of time. So, it definitely erred on the side of it being longer. Obviously, your podcasts are very long, and they do really well. So, I think that when it's niche and specific, I think it's okay to deviate from whatever the rules of thumb are because I think you have to make content that's authentic to you and what messaging you want to get out there. The blog posts are also on the longer side compared to what I would say is a "traditional" blog post. I wanted to make sure that the content that I was putting out there was not like...it doesn't need to be a tax memo, but it was at least detailed enough that I was hitting the main components and the main groups of people in which it would apply and who it would not apply to. So, someone reading it actually could get the information they need to make a decision for themselves.

Michael: So, this, it sounds like just became the central marketing channel and focus. "I don't want to do advertisements on other platforms now. It worked early on, but then other people show up, and I can't necessarily control it. So, I want my thing that I can control," which was content to show your expertise with this combination of blog and podcast, build a focused audience. I only need 1,000 people following it to be able to grow the client base meaningfully."

Anjali: Yes, pretty much that would sum it.

How Anjali Decided To Increase Her Minimum Annual Fee To $18,000 [30:45]

Michael: So, I guess, help us understand more, like what kind of clients showed up?

Anjali: I think when I came on last time, I think my minimum was $10,000 a year. And that price point was fine for a little bit of time. But when people started finding me on the podcast and through blogs…because my blog posts would start showing up on physician Facebook groups as well, which was a nice pleasant surprise that I wasn't expecting... And I would find out from my physician clients who were like, "You're on this physician mom group and your blog post is on there." And I was like, "Oh, great. Can you tell me how it's doing and what people are saying?" And so, they'd be like, 'Yeah, sure." Just for my own data. But I started to get people right on point. I would start to get a lot of physician households coming in with young families. My income range that at least right now in which it makes sense for clients to work with me is about $0.5 million. So, I would say almost all my clients are in the $0.5 million to $2 million income range annually. So, I was starting to get more people in that group, and they were right on point. And so, then all of a sudden, I started to get a lot more people than my team and I were ready to handle at that rate. So, as you know, I take that as an opportunity to increase my fees. So, I would say between...

Michael: When demand exceeds supply, clearly you need to raise your fees.

Anjali: Exactly, the concept of economics. So, I decided to just start testing it out. So, I think I went to a $12,000 minimum a year fee. Then I bumped it up to a $15,000-a-year minimum fee. And then now, my price point is at $18,000 a year minimum for more simple households, like W-2 employees, not too much other complexity. And then for anyone who has a little bit more tax complexity, maybe they have 1099 income, or they are a practice owner, or something like that, their minimum is at $21,000 a year. So, I've been at that price point, I want to say, for the last year. So, for that one, I think I'm happy with, and I don't anticipate any price adjustments, but I am not wed to my pricing. So, if demand goes up again, then I would adjust my prices accordingly. So, it gave me an opportunity not only to bring in clients, but I was able to bring in the exact right type of client I wanted to serve, and then I was able to also raise my fees because I was now working with 35 to 45 client households that were all very similar. So, it was a lot of just expertise that my team and I had built. And there's also a lot of just information that we can provide to these clients because we're working with 44 other people who are pretty much almost identical to the way they are.

And so I didn't think that that was a big selling point for people until I had multiple clients tell me because I did do an informal client survey a few years ago like, "What do you like? What don't you like? What do you think is one of the greatest value-adds that we provide to you when we're doing planning?" And so, multiple clients told me that they appreciate the fact that they know that I'm working with X amount of other clients that are very similar to them. And there's a lot of collective knowledge that we've built that we can share, obviously not sensitive information, but we can share a lot of these generalities and even some specifics with them and like, "Hey, so-and-so is also a practice owner, and their contract was structured this way, and they're getting this much compensation, and they're in the same specialty as you." So, it really just allowed us to create a very niche boutique firm in which we can provide this really high level of service, but also have this deep expertise because I was very specific about making sure that FIT Advisors continue to work with our niche.

So, I do not deviate outside the niche. I haven't deviated outside the niche for, I would say, at least the last 4 years because I realized anyone that I brought on that it was outside our normal client base that we usually serve, they took longer to service because we just didn't have that expertise. So, an example is someone with a lot of stock options. I don't take those clients on because it just takes me a lot longer to go back and familiarize myself with how stock options work. And I don't have enough clients with stock options that I'm really giving them the expertise that they need. So, I think part of the learning/growing process over the last 6 years is being able to say no, which was not what I was doing my first 3 years. I was like, "You want to work with me? Great. Come on in." But it was being much more diligent about saying like, "No, you're not the right fit, but here's someone who could be the right fit," and just being very mindful on every single slot because I'm only going to have 50 clients total. So, I wanted to make sure that every slot that was filled was the exact right type of client that should be in that seat.

Michael: Yeah, it's one of the things that's fascinating to me about how specializations evolve. There's this mentality out there of, "If I pick something to specialize in, I'm obligated to eliminate 100% of my other opportunities that come in. I'm required to say no to everybody else." And that's not the point. Say yes to anyone and everyone you want, but you can literally only serve so many clients. And at some point, non-ideal clients are going to take seats on the bus that will take you longer to serve while being willing to pay you less.

Anjali: Correct.

Michael: And you now get the wonderful choice of, well, either you can now let them go, which you're going to feel bad about because most of us don't like letting clients go. So, beware taking on clients you're going to have to let go of later if you don't want to let go of them later. Or we don't want to let go of them, so we hire associate advisors to serve them as well and hand them off. And now, we have to manage people and deal with all the stuff that goes with managing people while we take our least profitable clients and have them serviced by fixed overhead and get stuck in these other challenges. Whereas at some point, if you're really focused on a clientele that works, I think as you've lived, you just get to the point of, "It's just literally less profitable for me to take clients that don't fit and take up room for the ones that are better fits."

Anjali: Right. And I think as I'm doing this longer and also the stage of life I'm at, like I'm in my 40s, I have a child, I'm running a household, I have aging parents, there's so many different things that are taking up my time, that my time is... I'm much more aware of how valuable my time is. And I'm really decisive when it comes to saying yes or no to things based on the time.

Especially after COVID, where my time was even more limited than it is even right now, I had to make really hard decisions. That's when I had to stop the podcast, I had to stop the blog. I literally had to stop everything that wasn't just essential to serving my clients because I just didn't have the capacity to do so. My daughter, we pulled her out of school. My husband is a physician. So, he's going into the hospital. He's not able to work from home. So, everything fell on me, and I just couldn't manage it all. And so, after COVID passed...

Michael: You just flat-out paused all marketing for a while in the midst of COVID?

Anjali: I did. I had to. I did a final wrap-up episode. I said like, "I'm going to take a pause, just because of what's going on." I still wrote a few more blog posts, but even then, I ended up doing a wrap-up like, "It's just too much. I can't do it. So, I'm taking a pause from everything I like." I let everyone know. We put it out in the newsletter. And I have not resumed any of those channels again, which is interesting. And I haven't had to because I seem to still get enough prospect flow because we really only take on, I want to say, 2 to 4 clients a year. And that's just from... I'll have anywhere from 1 to 3 clients drop off any given year because attrition is pretty normal. And so, I'm just replacing those people who are dropping off. So, for 2 to 4 slots, I get enough traction with the content that I have out there, even though it is a little bit old, it's still kind of more evergreen, which was helpful. And my word-of-mouth referral network is just much stronger now. So, most of my prospects and clients who come in are word of mouth from other clients.

Michael: So, in practice, this was... I don't mean this is in a negative way, but this was a marketing phase, literally the business, 3 years building with the ads and the original structure, 3 years of doing your own content marketing until COVID happened to derail it. And now, 3 more years where there's enough brand and existing clients and word of mouth and maybe some legacy traffic from the content of the past that it sustains your ability to get in a couple of new clients per year at the numbers that you need.

Anjali: Exactly, which was not the intent. My plan was to continue the blog and the podcast indefinitely, but life happens, and you have to make adjustments. And I haven't felt a strong need to restart those channels because I get enough of the flow in, and I honestly don't want too many more clients in any given year because I just think that's what we can handle with our current client base and our individual capacities on me and my team members. So, there hasn't been really a strong need to restart that, which is interesting.

Michael: And just remind me, what is the income for typical clients at this point? Who's paying $18-plus thousand a year fees, $21,000 a year fees?

Anjali: $0.5 million to $2 million of income per year. So, I do have an intake form before anyone can book an initial consultation call with me. And those are the types of things I'm looking at is like income, assets because if someone is coming in and their income is $100,000, which they...

Michael: It's going to be a little rough.

Anjali: Yeah. And I would tell them that, "These are my price points." And it's interesting because I have had a lot of people almost balk at that fee like, "How can you charge that much money?" And the people who come who want to talk to me are not usually phased by that price point. Some are, but most aren't because it's people who...they already know they want to work with me. I've had clients or prospects who are like, "We already know we want to work with you. Just tell us how much it costs and when we could start."

So, it's not like they're not sensitive to price, but I think that they either have been looking for a while, maybe have had previous experiences that aren't great, or just at a point in their life that they're like, "I need to get this done, and I need to just find someone and throw money at the situation and just make sure that my financial plan gets done," because my average client age is also early 40s. So, these are not early-stage people. These are mid-career professionals where they also understand the value of their time. So, to them, it's much more important that they find the person who's the right fit, who's going to take things off their plate, who really understands their situation. So, price is a factor, but it's not the primary factor for a lot of these individuals.

Michael: Well, and if you're getting clients that are a million-plus dollars of income, 20 grand is a big number, but when you net a million...

Anjali: Yeah, it's not.

Michael: ...it's 2% of your income. 20 grand to someone who makes a million is like a $3,000 planning fee to a household that makes $150 (thousand).

Anjali: Exactly. So, it's all relative.

Michael: So, just curious, mechanically, how do you charge this? Do you literally charge a $21,000 annual fee? Do you break it up through the year, or do they still have investment accounts that you bill it from, or do you run it through their businesses because they're physician practices? How do you actually execute on a $21,000 fee?

Anjali: Sure. So, in addition to the fee, there's a one-time onboarding fee that we charge. So, that's $3,000. We charge that upfront and it covers the first meeting. And then I usually invoice it monthly. So, whether it's personally, if they're W-2, or if it's something that the CPA says will be tax deductible, we invoice it directly to the business, and the clients will pay on a monthly basis. And then the fee covers the first $1 million of assets I directly manage. So, what I do towards the end of the year is we look at where everyone's investment accounts are. And for clients who are above $1 million assets that I directly manage, I calculate a 0.5% fee on the assets above $1 million. And then that gets added to their essentially base planning retainer fee. And then that new fee will go into effect in the following year. And then if no adjustments apply...

Michael: And then it's set annually, you're not resetting the AUM fee quarterly?

Anjali: Correct. I just set it annually. I have 4 clients who are AUM-only clients. So, they're in the traditional like, "We bill it quarterly. We pull fees from the account." But everyone else, I just do it on an annual basis. And it just gets rolled into their monthly retainers. So, it's not coming out of investment accounts unless they choose to do so. But most of these clients are in wealth accumulation stage. So, no one wants assets pulled from their accounts. They're like, "We'll just pay it out of cash flow."

Michael: So, I'm fascinated by this, that the planning fee covers the first million of assets. I think there's a lot of advisors who say like, "When you get to a certain level of assets, we'll waive the planning fee." You have an interesting flip the other way around, although it's not even that the planning fee...once you get above a certain planning fee, the investments are waived. If the investment counts are large enough, there's still some investment management fee, but you cover the base first million of investments in a planning fee.

Anjali: Correct. I know. It's a little different from the norm, but it works well for me and my client base I've been with.

Michael: Because they're high income and a lot of tax and financial complexity, but they just literally don't necessarily have large portfolios yet. It's not the center of why they're paying…

Anjali: I would say most of my clients, I do have a lot that are under that million, but I would say...because they're all high-income earners, and they contribute a lot to the portfolio. So, a lot of them are getting into the $2 to $5 million portfolio range, which is my sweet spot of where I like clients to be. I have some that are higher than the $5. I have some that are in the $10, or the $10 to $20, but that's definitely not the client base that I am targeting. I'm really targeting this $1 to $5 million asset household, young working professionals, mid-career, early 40s. A lot of them have children. That's not a requirement, though. And they're just in a phase of their life where time is very limited, but they have a lot of complexity because of where they are in their life stage. And so, that seems to be where I've found I can provide the most value in terms of who I'm serving.

Leveraging Tax Expertise To Provide High-Value Services [46:20]

Michael: So now, help us understand like what do you do for $18,000 to $21,000 a year in fees? What is the service offering that's wrapped into this?

Anjali: Yeah. We do all the traditional aspects of financial planning. My value add that there's not that many advisors who have a CPA tax background, so that's a big component of it, is that we review all the tax returns. We do projections. There's great tax planning projection softwares. I don't trust any of them. So, I built out my own. We do quarterly estimates. We're doing a lot of this proactive planning that normally the CPA firms do. But as a lot of us know, the CPA firms are just so overwhelmed with compliance that very few do proactive tax planning. So, that's one large component of our financial planning practice is really that tax piece of it. And I will tell you, I look at every return before it's filed, and my team and I find something on every single return. And it's not because the CPA did a bad job, it's because they're doing hundreds of tax returns. So, things get missed.

We keep detailed tax checklists for every single one of our clients. So, when review time comes around, we already list out all the things we need to be mindful of. Like, "Oh, they refinanced their property. Let's make sure that that's being included." Like, "Maybe they purchased an electronic vehicle. Let's see if they're below the income limits." Some are, most aren't, to be able to get the tax credit. So, there's things that we're keeping track of throughout the year. And then we're just doing much more proactive tax planning because I have the ability to help identify the tax planning strategies. And then I can bring it to the CPA throughout the year so that we can implement it versus backward-looking on like, "Oh, we should have done that for the last year, but it's too late because the tax year is over." And then there's nuances that I encounter working with physician households. So, a lot of it is contract review. So, I do review all the contracts. I always premise it by saying like, "I'm not an attorney, but I look at contracts all the time." So, I can tell you what looks off to me, what the compensation looks like, and what I've seen other contracts have that maybe this one lacks that we should ask for because...

Michael: Contracts meaning their employment contracts...

Anjali: Correct.

Michael: ...like when they're cutting their...?

Anjali: Their employment contracts. Yes, mainly their employment contracts. But also, clients who are going to maybe join a medical group and there's a structure in which they're an employee for maybe 2 to 4 years, and then they become partner. And then what the partnership track looks like, and then what compensation and all of those things that change, and if they need to do a buy-in. So, those are all the things that I review as part of the process, just for them to be able to understand because so many physicians will sign off on contracts that they don't understand, that there's things that they don't realize, and they leave, and then they have to pay money for all of these coverages that they didn't realize that they should be looking at.

I have a lot of clients who really like real estate. So, any real estate investment that a client is looking at, whether it's private, a syndication, or direct ownership of a property, we look at all of those numbers to see it, just...and it's really for me to give them a second opinion on these investments. Especially when we're looking at anything that's going to be a larger component of their portfolio, I also want to make sure it makes sense from an overall portfolio standpoint. I don't want someone to put $0.5 million into private equity syndication real estate deals, but then they only have $5,000 invested in the market. That's not balanced. So, to me, I would be concerned about that. And those are the types of things in the conversations that we have.

And we're really big on our clients, kind of bringing us everything that money touches. A lot of advisors do this already. We are the same. Anything that you're thinking about, even if you're kind of like, "I don't know, but I'm thinking about this," we want to know so we can start proactively thinking about it and planning for it, so that it makes it a lot easier when you're going to make these big decisions because we've already done some initial legwork and numbers around it. And I think at the end of the day, a lot of us know that clients stay with us long-term because there's comfort in working with an advisor who understands them and gets them. And that's something that you can't...you can put a price on it, but that's the soft part of our work that really is hard to quantify from a fee standpoint. But if you can figure out that stickiness in which you can get people to come in and they really want to stay with you long-term, that's I think where the value-add is. And I think that's just a component of how we work with our clients and then the systems and the processes we've created to make sure that we're really able to handle everything for that client, but also meeting with them at a frequency that they're comfortable with, that they feel like we're there. We're not just checking in 2 times a year, we're checking in with them throughout the year because there's a bunch of things we're doing throughout the year in terms of having those touchpoints with them that are relevant, not just like, "Hey, how are you doing," type of a thing.

Michael: Is there a standard, I don't know, touchpoint structure or cadence or goal that you aim for?

Anjali: Yes. So, most of our clients, we schedule out every single client meeting for the entire year. Amy on my team does that. She usually does it in November. So, we know on any given month how many clients we're meeting with. And then once we have new clients, we layer them in, and that's just to balance the schedule out. And so, when we meet with clients, I pull up the spreadsheet and I said, "Okay, we're meeting with you again in 3 months." And they're like, "Okay, perfect." I was like, "Just reach out if something comes up." But then...

Michael: Is quarterly actually a standard cadence for you as a baseline? Like just you again in 3 months?

Anjali: No. Standard cadence is probably twice a year. Some of our clients are 3 times a year, and then others may be more depending on what needs that they have. And so, some of our clients are much more higher frequency because they just need those extra meetings to be held accountable, but their price point will also be higher to account for more meetings throughout the year.

Michael: So, it's not just an always fixed year, like the $18,000 or $21,000 client. Folks that need more high touch, you do price adjust for them?

Anjali: Yes. Usually in the first year, I keep the fee the same, but my contract is written that if there's a change in scope or complexity, the fee can get adjusted. So, we've had clients that start at a certain price point, and then they come to us, and they're like, "We really need to do monthly meetings." And I said, "Okay, that's fine. But the price is going to get adjusted because we have you guys set to meet 3 times a year." So, going to 12 meetings a year, and they're like, "That's fine. Just let us know what that is."

Michael: Just how much do you adjust something like that? Is that like you go from 21 to 23, or is it like you go from 21 to 30?

Anjali: No, I don't do that large price adjustments. It's usually anywhere from like, I would say, $250 to $500 per month more than where we might currently be at because what happens at the monthly if we have...and we don't have too many clients on monthly, is they're only really meeting with me 2 to 3 times a year. And then the other meetings will happen with Amy because they really just need someone to help them rebalance their 401(k), or they need to call Fidelity to initiate a rollover. So, I've tried to delegate out the work where if I don't need to be on that meeting, I'm not going to be and letting my team handle some of those meetings that are more just like what we call working meetings versus planning meetings.

Michael: Okay. So, meetings get scheduled out for the entire year in advance, just so you can smooth and spread the meetings out and not have them be too clustered. So, are there other things that you focus on in terms of touchpoints throughout the year?

Anjali: Yes. So, we usually we'll do touchpoints every time estimated tax payments are coming up. So, clients get a touchpoint at that point. They get a touchpoint usually 2 months out before tax, like a tax filing deadline. They get a touchpoint on starting to upload their documents. So, we have a unique share file link that goes directly into their supporting tax docs folder. So, we share that with them. And then we have a list because we keep a list for every client on all the documents they need to gather. So, we put that in the email as well. And then there's usually touchpoints at the beginning of the year when we need clients to update their 401(k) contribution rates. We use a mail merge and create a template to calculate everyone's contribution amount if the overall limit has gone up for the year, which it kind of has been over the past few years. So then, that blanket email gets...and it's a mail merge, so it's an individual email that gets sent out to all the clients first week of January. And then some will reach back out to us if they need help with how to update that.

And then there's another one that goes out later in January for everyone we want to do backdoor Roths for because we like to do those as early in the year as possible. And then right now, we have a touchpoint going out for clients who we think are good fit to do a donor-advised fund because we want to start doing those contributions now as well. And then there's extra ones that we have for business owners because their meeting frequency is a little higher because we do quarterly reviews over their financials. And a lot of this sits in internal checklists that we have because I do weekly meetings with my team. So, depending on what time of year it is, we'll go through our checklist, and then a lot of the other more individual client touchpoints will be in Redtail, which my team manages.

Michael: Okay. And just to be clear, a lot of your touchpoints are tax-oriented given CPA background, but you're not doing tax returns. That's not part of the offering for clients.

Anjali: Correct.

Michael: So, I guess I got to ask why not? You're so into their tax business already.

Anjali: I think it's because I wore that hat, and I know what's involved in order to be up to date on the rules and regulations to prepare a tax return in a manner in which I feel very comfortable and confident in that return. And in my opinion as a CPA who's done tax for 7-plus years prior to transitioning to financial planning, I don't have the ability to do all the financial planning plus keep up with the tax rules and regulations and be able to prepare that return in a way in which I would feel comfortable with.

Michael: Okay. And the idea of hiring someone into the business to do the returns doesn't help because that just adds people to manage and cost structure.

Anjali: Honestly, I just have never found the right fit. It would be a lot easier if I had someone in-house, and I just have not found the ideal person where it would make sense to bring that in-house. So, we have 3 or 4 CPAs that we work with, that we refer clients to, and who are very comfortable with our process and our approach.

FIT Advisors' Team Structure And Outsourced Service Providers [58:07]

Michael: So, what does the team structure look like to support all the stuff that you do for clients?

Anjali: So, I am still lead advisor on every single client. Amy on my team is operations manager, paraplanner, kind of like my right-hand person. She's been with me for quite some time. And then Alejandra is our client service associate. She actually was an intern for FIT through the BLX Internship Program, and then we needed the help, and she was wonderful. So, she's been full-time with FIT for 2 years now. And then in addition, I have an outsourced CIO that helps me with trades and more investment, like portfolio allocation, more of the strategic planning on the investment side.

Michael: So, are they solely doing investment research, or do they actually implement and do the trading functionality for you?

Anjali: So, they queue up all the trades for me, but I'm the one that reviews and submits, along with doing research. So, I have a lot of clients who are very into AI emerging technology. So, I can ping him and let him know like, "Hey, is there any ETFs that focus on these technologies?" And he'll do the research and let me know so that I can go back to my client and see if that's something that they want to invest in or not.

Michael: And so, can I ask who do you work with as an outsourced CIO?

Anjali: Yes, I work with Trace Tisler. He might hate that I put his name out there, but he's another... He has an RIA based in Ohio, and he's also a good friend of mine. So, we've known each other since the start of our firms because we both started our firms around the same time. And it actually just came up as a need during COVID because I didn't feel like I had...because I'm on the West Coast, so the markets are closed by 1 p.m. my time, and I would be up at 5 a.m. to start working. But sometimes I just didn't feel like I had enough time for someone to do all the trades I wanted to do. And there's so much market volatility happening at the time. I wanted to make sure that I had all my ducks in a row in terms of making sure I was compliant and doing what I needed to do for my clients in terms of investment. So, I actually interviewed a number of outsourced CIOs at that point. Some were purely investment-focused, some are ones where they are "advisor," and you put them on your ADV, and then some are the structure I have now where it's outsourced. They can queue up all the trades in the system.

And I use Orion for trading and portfolio performance. But you as the advisor, the ones that execute and implement, so that arrangement seemed like that was the best fit because it could be outsourced contractor, but I'm the one who's submitting everything. And it just worked out best with Trace because him and I were in a study group together. So, we all already had similar portfolios. We use a lot of Dimensional and Vanguard. So, that seemed like that would be the easiest transition.

Michael: So, I'm assuming because you're still responsible for the trading, this doesn't show up like a TAMP [Turnkey Asset Management Program]-style charge and basis points. You simply pay a...

Anjali: Monthly retainer.

Michael: ...a flat fee or an hourly fee kind of structure?

Anjali: Correct. I pay him a monthly retainer.

Michael: Okay. Okay. And was that the appeal? Was that the goal? I have to presume you were looking at TAMPs and other styles of arrangements in evaluating the choices. How did you end out with monthly retainer, outsource CIO, but I still have to trade as the sweet spot on the spectrum of the zillion different outsourced investment options for advisors?

Anjali: Yeah, the problem with the TAMP model because that was the first model I explored was that so many of those models, you have to use their models. A lot of them don't have good options for small portfolio accounts, which I do have a lot of small client accounts still because I was already like, what, 5 years into my business. I already had a lot of assets under management. We had a lot of the stuff built out. So, I just wasn't comfortable needing to sell a bunch of stuff and creating tax implications and doing things where we'd have to materially change how the portfolios were going to look going forward.

Michael: And so notwithstanding the fact that it seems like you're built more around the retainer model for business owners and physicians that they pay from their income, what is assets under management add up to at this point, given the sheer dollars of some of the clients involved?

Anjali: Yeah. So, I'm at $65 million, which is not so huge compared to my revenue. But I think it's because the focus of my firm and our service offering is the comprehensive financial planning and investments is a piece of it. But investments is not the main driver. So, I'm not super focused on accumulating assets as quickly as possible. That's just not the intent because, yeah, the fee goes up if there's more assets, but it's such a small incremental adjustment that the bulk of our revenue is still the base planning fee that we get from clients. And the work that we focus on is really the planning work with the investments as a component. And so, for someone with $750,000 in revenue, I should probably be in the $75 to a $100 million in AUM range, and I'm not quite there because I still have a number of clients who are paying that higher fee, but their assets just aren't there. And that's another component of physician households is that I do have physicians who have student loans that are in the $0.5 million, $2 million range. So, that debt burden is still pretty significant. So, they may not be at a point yet where they can put a lot of weight into a taxable brokerage account. Really, what they're just doing right now is employer 401(k) accounts, maybe their backdoor Roth, but we're really focused more on managing that student loan debt.

Michael: Well, it strikes me, if you wanted to relate this back in an AUM context, $750,000 of revenue and $65 million in assets, it's just shy of a 1.2% AUM fee equivalent. Obviously, your fees would line up differently. Some clients will be 0 because their net worth is negative with student loans, so, problematic in how it would align for certain clients. But to say, "Well, we have a deeper tax-centric, physician-centric, additional value-added services with a CPA background," yeah, we don't charge 1%. We charge a little bit more than 1 because we're really good at what we do with this specialized clientele that we serve. I could easily tell a story about how this fits even in an AUM context to say that you have an above-average premium value proposition. So, you charge an above-average premium fee on an AUM basis with the caveat that your fee structure seems to fit better for who you're serving because their complexity is really not dictated by their portfolio size. It's dictated much more by their practice size and the income they earn from it and the stuff that's attached to it, which is why some of them have big portfolios and some of them have big student loan balances, but they are all in need of the help and willing to pay the fee.

Anjali: And interestingly enough, it doesn't come up much in prospect calls. And I don't know if that's just a function of the monthly retainer just being more common in our profession now where people who are looking at advisors are all coming across something similar unless they're talking to a Morgan Stanley or whatnot. I don't get much pushback on like, "Oh, why do you charge like that and not on the assets?" It's not a question that comes up much when I have my calls.

Deciding "What's Next" After Exceeding Her Revenue Target [1:06:35]

Michael: So, as you look back on this journey over the past 6 years now, again, I'm fascinated the revenue 3Xed, the client base only slightly increased. What surprised you the most about, I guess, this stage of the building journey?

Anjali: I think there's a few components to it. It's definitely a lot harder than I thought it was going to be. When I set out to build FIT, I was really targeting a half-million revenue firm. And then I far exceeded that, but I don't get the gratification that I thought I would get from it. And I think that's just a component of... it's so hard to build a business, and there's so much of it that you put into it and so much that it takes from you that when you get to that goal that you set, there's a little bit of like, "That's amazing that I've built this firm, but there's..." You think about everything that went into it, that is just... It's hard. It's just hard for me sometimes to be like, "Okay, it's great," but it's also what went into it just can be so draining, both emotionally, physically, as well from a capacity standpoint. And then I'm in this weird stage where I am no longer interested in growing FIT beyond 50-client households. Maybe we can get close to a million in revenue. I don't know, but that's all I want to do with FIT Advisors because I've looked at the other options, I'm really not interested in bringing on another advisor because I don't want to be in the business of managing more people. I really like the client service aspect, and 50 is really all I can handle from my capacity standpoint and the way we service clients. I just can't do more than 50.

So, for me, it's really thinking about like, "What do I do next?" And that's really hard for me because like many of us, I'm a very goals-oriented person, and I've had goals I've set for myself since I was a child. And then what happens when you meet all the goals you've set for yourself, and now it's this open field of like, "You could do anything you want," but that's a very scary place for someone like me to be in because I don't know what that looks like. I don't know what the next 5 to 10 years of my career is going to evolve to. Of course, I'm going to keep my planning firm, but I will be at a point where my daughter is going to be older, so she's not going to need as much of my time, and I will have capacity. And where am I going to spend that extra time? And that's where I'm in this middle place in which I'm like, "I don't really know yet because I am not going to just continue building a firm in which I have 100 clients." I'm going to keep FIT where it's at. It's going to continue to naturally grow because clients will accumulate more assets. We'll obviously bring in clients as clients drop off, but I am struggling with that right now, and I'm someone who's very impatient. So, a lot of people are telling me I have to go through the journey and be patient with the journey. And that's just something that is just it's really hard. So, that's where I'm struggling right now, Michael.

Michael: Well, it's fascinating to me. I mean, in part, even that when you're talking about a 50-client threshold, there's still room to grow. So, maybe we'll get up to a million or just 50 clients if every client is on the $18,000 to $21,000 fee schedule, and then some start accumulating assets over time. You're on a path to clear a million of revenue with no more than 50 clients, just simply with the model you've got and the services that you're providing.

Anjali: True. True. But I think it's that shift from growing a firm for the main goal of bringing in revenue to sustain your household and your lifestyle to more of like, "What impact am I going to have?" Whether it's in the profession, whether it's somewhere else. Now, I'm much more looking at what impact I can have and what my values are and how do I leverage what I've built to now do something that's going to be more impact-value-driven. And that's an interesting space to be in because there are people who are doing that, but there's not so many people doing it where I can draw upon someone else's experience to be like, "That's what I want to do next, or that's what I want to do." It's me figuring out internally what it is that brings me joy and drives me. And then how do I take that and do something with it that is going to fulfill me as I'm approaching this middle-age stage of my life.

Michael: And I was like, do you have a sense as to what it's going to be, or it's really still a big mystery here living down the journey to find out what formulates forth?

Anjali: I think about the things that I do enjoy. During COVID, I wrote a children's book, and it's a book that my daughter's the main character in because for me, I really wanted to have a passion project that was outside of my very technical financial planning hat. And I was just frustrated that there was a lack of South Asian representation in children's literature. So, I wrote the book, and I'm so happy with it. But I literally don't do anything with it because I, once again, don't have the bandwidth or capacity, and I don't know if selling books is really what I want to do. But I love the impact and the story and what the book represents. But I'm still struggling with how do I merge this kind of children's author hat that I've worn with the financial planning hat that I wear and this outsourced CFO role that I take, and how do I kind of blend all of these personalities and hats that I wear together into something that's cohesive, and then what do I do with that? Where do I go from here?

And that's where I just don't know because I'm technical, I think very linearly, and I can't in terms of how I'm approaching this part of the journey. And so, for me, I think it's just needing to find ways in which I can tap back into the creative side that I had at one point when I was younger and seeing what comes out of that.

Michael: Yeah. I find it a fascinating crossroads that I think particularly in our financial planning world because we are goal-oriented machines, it just seems to be how we're wired. We're people who love setting goals and achieving them and then helping clients at their goals and helping them achieve the goals that they set because we like setting and achieving goals. I've seen a lot of advisors go different directions with this. A lot of the time, it just seems to be, "I want a different goal that's not a money goal." So, I knew one advisor where the goal was, "How many days of vacation can I get in with the family and not undermine the business? I want the business to be supported and be healthy. I'm going to make it as efficiently as I possibly can, see how many vacation days I can get in around the business." I knew another where his metric for years was how many hours of PTA volunteerism he did. He was PTA dad on top of a very successful financial planning practice, but he got to the point where the practice gave the money that he needed to put the kids to college and retire, and the what's next was, "I'm going to optimize for PTA hours." I've seen others that just say like, "All right, my client capacity is ____, 50 clients, or 20 clients, or 100 clients, whatever it is. I'm going to see how valuable I can be to 20 great clients." And I talked to one advisor that was well over $1.5 million of revenue, and it was like 22 clients or something like that. He was the consigliere confidant to 20-something business owners who had a whole bunch of complexity, huge amounts of complexity.

Anjali: Yeah, no, I love that. Yeah. I think for me, it's being able to have a voice in these professions that I am in, in which they're very underrepresented for people who look like me and sound like me, whether it's financial planning, children's literature is even worse, which I was like, "Oh, wow, that even is more underrepresented." So, I'm really trying to focus on my passions, like that's a passion I have. The other passion is the CFO work takes up a lot of my time, and I would say all my CFO clients are people of color. And being able to work with them in terms of how much I learn and grow and how much value I can provide in spaces in which they may not always have access to is also really rewarding for me. But so is the planning work when we really do make an impact in clients' lives.

And I'm someone like if you took 10 clients away, I would still work the same amount that I work now because it's just my personality type because my husband has told me this. He's like, "Well, you seem stressed out all the time. Why don't you just have less clients?" And I was like, "I'll still be stressed out." It's just my personality. I'm still going to do the work."

Michael: The client work expands to fill the available time.

Anjali: Exactly.

The Low Point On Anjali's Journey [1:16:56]

Michael: So, what was the low point for you on this journey?

Anjali: I think there were a few. One was when my prospect flow completely dried up, right? That was a really hard year financially for my husband and I because we moved to Los Angeles. We bought a home, so we just had a lot of bills. So, not only was I stressing out about my plateau and growth, but I also had real financial stressors personally. And then again, COVID. COVID was very, very rough. It was rough for a lot of us. Physician households, there was another element to it where...and this was something where I was going through very similar things that a lot of my clients were going through, where we were on phone calls and my client is asking me like, "Is your husband moving out? Are you moving out? What are you guys doing around this?" And my daughter and I went and lived with my parents for a while because my husband was so worried about exposure at the hospital, and this was so early. We didn't know enough information. And he's like, "I'm just going to need you to go." And I was like, "For how long?" And he's like, "I don't know, indefinitely?" And I had 6 or 7 other clients that were all doing the exact same thing.

So, that was really tough. I really liked doing my podcast, and I really loved that part of it. So, just to have to give up so much was really tough as well. And it was just survival mode. So many of us were just in survival mode at that time. So, that was just a really hard period. And it was not only hard personally, but it was also we were taking on a lot of the emotions of our clients who were also going through really hard times. I had a few client businesses that got shut down during COVID because of the mandate. So, that on top of me trying to manage my own personal situations, like I'm meeting with these clients every day because they're like, "What are we going to do? We shut down, right?" So, helping them work through it, trying to get them PPP funding, that was really rough. Ever since then, it's not like things are low points, but there are periods that are just hard. I'm still a solo advisor in a certain respect. So, I still have to do all the compliance and everything that comes with it. And I've outsourced a lot of what I could outsource because that was part of where I decided a few years ago is to just spend money and to free up some more of my time so I can focus on what I really want to do. But there are just certain things I can't outsource.

So, sometimes the day-to-day of that will get to me, but I try to take a step back and try to reflect on what I have been able to build and the fact that I do have a lot of flexibility because my biggest thing right now is being able to have the flexibility to be present in my daughter's life. I want to be able to pick her up from school every day. I want to make sure that if there's opportunities to volunteer at school that I have the flexibility to do so. So, there's definite perks that I really enjoy having my own firm, but there is a lot of just either low points or just struggles or things that are just really frustrating that will constantly come up that you just have to deal with as a small business owner.

What Anjali Wishes She Had Known Before Her Recent Growth Phase [1:20:27]

Michael: So, is there something that you know now that you wish that you had known 6 years ago as you were going through the first of these transition phases for the business?

Anjali: I wish I had invested in marketing right off the bat, to be perfectly honest, because I already had my niche formulated when I started my firm. And I wish I just wasn't so cheap about it at that time. And I wish I just started some sort of marketing channel really early on.

Michael: You were literally spending on advertising...

Anjali: Yeah. But you know the advertising, maybe I was spending like $2,000 a year. It was low-cost stuff that I was doing. And then obviously, I went to spending $2,000 a month, which at the time I was like, "I wish I did it sooner." But there's also a piece of it where it's really hard to spend that much money when you only have 8 clients and you're not really bringing in much revenue.

Michael: I was going to ask, is there a part of this that the business just had to grow to a certain point where spending on marketing that way would math appropriately?

Anjali: Probably. But I'm like a grass is always greener on the other side type of person. So, I was like, "I wish I did that a year earlier." And some of it is just the growing pains of it. I think I needed to have experienced that plateau to really push me to really create the marketing channel and to do it not in this ad hoc way, but in a very diligent way to get the results that I want.

Marketing is not something even to this day that comes naturally to me. It's why I still pay someone to do marketing because it just my brain doesn't work that way and it's just not something that I particularly like. So, I need someone to tell me what to do type of a thing. And that really helped get me to a place to where I'm like, "Okay, I can do this." Because that's the thing, is like you have to create the marketing channel, which you know you can sustain because if it's too hard or it just doesn't feel right, it's not going to be one that you're going to keep up with. And then it doesn't really work at the end of the day because consistency is so important when it comes to that.

Anjali's Advice For Newer Advisors [1:22:49]

Michael: So, any other advice you would give younger, newer advisors coming into the profession and trying to start building their careers today?

Anjali: Yeah. I think there's so many great things I've learned over the years. I think what I appreciate now is that there's actually firms like my firm and a lot of other great firms where you can now go work in those firms. When I was starting off, there weren't very many firms built like mine. So, a lot of us felt like the only option was to start a firm, which is okay, too. But starting a firm is really, really hard and growing it can be even harder. So, finding the right fit is so important. For anyone who's thinking about starting their own firm or in their early stages, I feel like it's really helpful to try as often as you possibly can to focus working on the business versus in the business. You have more capacity early on. It's a lot harder when you're 45-plus clients in, but to just really be thinking about like, "What's the work I like to do? What's the work I don't like to do? Which are my clients that I really like working with? Who do I not like working with?" So that every person who comes in the door after that point or every decision you have to make after that point, you're much more mindful of, so you're building the firm you really want versus just trying to build something ad hoc that you need to fix later on.

Michael: And how do you answer all the folks that just get, I don't know, stuck, get fearful on, "But I just I'm afraid of all the clients I'm going to lose early on if I pick one thing to focus on out of the gate"?

Anjali: My whole career has been very technically focused on a niche. So, even when I was at PwC, I did state and local income tax. So, I'm wired to pick something and get really, really, really good at it and focus on that. And that's not everyone's cup of tea. That's why I think it's important for you to really understand who you are, who you want to serve, and the work you like to do. And even if you're more general, there's still going to be people who are going to come across your plate that are still not going to be a good fit. And it's okay to say no to them because that person you say no to now, you're going to be able to fill them with someone else later who's going to be the right fit, and the people who are not a right fit are really emotionally draining. And that is coming from personal experience. Those people were really emotionally draining for me. Those are the people that kept me up at night. Those are the people that I would have anxiety before I was going to meet with them. And then I finally got to a point where I'm like, "Why am I doing this to myself?" And then letting go of those clients. It's great in the aftermath of it, but it's really hard to let go of someone even if they're not a right fit because it's a relationship that's there, and it's hard to tell people like, "I can't work with you anymore."

So, I think if you can exhibit some constraint in the beginning, even though it's really hard, the payoff, later on, is just significantly more than the small amount of revenue you're going to get from that client in the interim. And especially if you're building something that's more of a boutique firm where you're not going to have 100 clients with multiple advisors and you are going to stick to a smaller firm, you have to be really mindful of how many clients you think you can serve and how many slots you have and how many people you want in those slots.

And I always did the math backwards. I was always like, "I'm going to have no more than 50 clients, and I want $0.5 million of revenue. So, each client has to pay $10,000." That's how I came up with that fee to start. And then it's adjusted along the way. And that's how I'm at 45 clients with $750 [thousand] of revenue. I think it's helpful to also understand what you need financially from the business because all of our time is really valuable. And the one thing I consistently see, and it's not just with advisors, it's with all of my business owners, is we really undervalue our service and our time. And we shouldn't. We should be really cognizant about our time and how much our time is worth, and then pricing our fees appropriately. And then from there, really understanding who's the clients that we really want to serve that's going to fulfill us and that who we're going to provide the most value to.

What Success Means To Anjali [1:27:16]

Michael: So, as we wrap up, this is a podcast about success. And just one of the long-standing themes is how the word success means different things to different people and sometimes changes for us as we go through our career and the business evolves. And so, as someone who's now built an objectively very financially successful business, almost $20,000 revenue per client is an amazing number. So, the business is in a wonderful place. How do you define success for yourself at this point?

Anjali: For me, success is having the ability to say “no” now to things I do not want to do and to have full control over my schedule so that I can have the flexibility to work when I need to work, but also have the time for myself and have the time for my family.

Michael: I love it. I love it. So, it feels like there's been a shift from the things we say yes to to get to the revenue and financial goals, to the autonomy over who we work with and what we do with our time once you feel like the dollars are getting to the place that you need to feel good financially and then other things become the priority.

Anjali: Exactly. Yeah, it's a really nice place for me to be in, in which I'm not overly focused about how many dollars are coming into the firm because the dollars are coming in, and we financially more or less can do what we need to and like to do within our family. So, having that stability because financial stability is so important for me just with how I grew up, it's really nice to be in a space in which I can say no.

Michael: I love it. I love it. Well, thank you so much, Anjali, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Anjali: Thank you for having me.

Michael: Thank you.