Kitces & Carl Ep 115: Setting The Right Minimum Fee Per Client And The Revenue Model Generator

***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and Stitcher.

Show Notes

• Kitces & Carl Ep 27: Handling The ‘Required Minimum’ Conversation Without Being Awkward
• How Much Does A (Comprehensive) Financial Plan Actually Cost?
• #FASuccess Ep 131: The (Nearly) $1B Solo Advisor: Scaling Up Client Focus By Outsourcing Everything Else, with Dan Goldie
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less by Dan Sullivan

Kitces & Carl Podcast Transcript

Michael: Well, hello Carl.

Carl: Greetings Michael Kitces. How's it going?

Michael: I'm doing well. I'm doing well. It is conference season as of when we're recording this, we'll be a little ways into the summer by the time it comes out. But how have conference travels been for you?

Carl: Yeah, it's been fun. One of the things that's really coming up often in speaking things is, people are asking about the blue couch, which opens up all this opportunity to troll Michael. So, now I have this... It's like a built-...

Michael: Troll me? My heart sings that...

Carl: It's a built-in...

Michael: ...it’s become something unto itself.

Carl: No. It's been super good, super good. So, yeah. The blue couch is a couple...

Michael: Is the couch traveling with you to conferences now?

Carl: This time I flew to everything so I didn't take the couch, but I'm excited to take the couch again soon. So, it's been good. I was at Jolt and a couple other places, it's been fun.

Michael: Excellent. I'm hoping we'll get another opportunity on the blue couch together.

Carl: We need to do that. We need to do an actual event, like a "Kitces and Carl Live" on the blue couch.

Michael: We did pictures on the blue couch at XYPN LIVE last year, but we weren't actually like joint session lot, just photo op with the blue couch.

Carl: For sure. What are we talking about?

The Complexities Of Calculating A Minimum Fee Per Client [01:32]

Michael: Oh, in conference season... I'm getting a lot of conversations these days around just, basically all things scaling advisory firms. To me, it's just sort of this natural thing of, we tend to accumulate clients because we usually don't lose them once we get them. And so, if you do this enough years, eventually you start getting a lot of clients and then it gets a little crowded, and then you gotta hire people. And then now that you gotta hire people, you gotta cover their costs and salary, and you've got this payroll thing. And so then, on the one end there's some stuff that shows up around that, literally around scaling, systems and process, and standardization, and managing client variability. And there's a bunch of things there.

But I wanted to go a slightly different direction today because I got this separate client question, I thought just it seems simple but has a whole lot of nuances to it. Which is just someone that had asked me, "What's the minimum average fee you have to charge each client to run a viable practice?" Like a viable solo practice or a viable boutique practice, if you're going to have a couple of people involved. And so, I thought it's a really interesting question to think about. There's business issues here, there's goals issues here, there's reach and access to financial planning for consumers issues here. I was like, "This is kind of a really loaded question of, what's the minimum average fee you should charge or you have to charge, to run a viable practice?"

Carl: Totally. Favorite type. You've got a spreadsheet for this, I would assume.

Michael: There are some spreadsheets.

Carl: There's been some Kitces' research.

Michael: There are some spreadsheets. Well, strictly speaking, we don't have research around what is a required minimum. We do have some numbers around, what advisors charge in practice. This is an interesting thing, just truly there's a lot of different angles around this. The first to me is just, look, I can't tell you what the average minimum fee is per client. So, you tell me how many clients you want to work with. "What's your average minimum fee?" "I don't know." "Well, I want to make $300,000 a year." "Cool, find a billionaire who'll pay you $300,000 a year to help manage their personal family office. And you'll have a client of one with average revenue per client of $300,000, and that's your take-home pay."

You tell me you want to serve the masses and you want to reach a thousand people. "Well, cool." And apparently you're going to be doing $300 plans for a thousand people and then we can have that conversation. So, just the first thing that jumps out to me at this, I can't answer what your minimum average fee per client is until you tell me how many clients you actually want to be serving, you want to be working with. So, I find that it does vary for us. Some of us really like super deep, with a small number of clients. Some of us love the reach and impact of "I'm basically going to cram as many clients in there as my brain can hold and my schedule can permit." Others… Well, I think most of us, those are obviously extremes, are kind of somewhere in the middle where, "I want a 'reasonable number' of clients that when I do a few meetings a year, I've still got the ability to service my clients, and enjoy my life, and take a little vacation." And we kind of back into, "If I do more or less the standard financial planning model, that many clients is my number."

Carl: Yeah. Can I...

Michael: Yeah. My first thought on this is, not to cop out with the classic financial planning it depends comment. But really, I can't answer this until you also tell me what your revenue goal is supposed to be in the first place. Revenue of profits, how much you actually try to make and how many clients do you even want to potentially sit across from every week, month, and year. And because really, I don't come at this from what's the fee need to be. I come at this with, tell me how many people you want to serve and how much you want to make. And I'm going to divide and I'm going to tell you what the average revenue per client is, with some caveats that we'll come back to. There's a business lens of this as well. But my first thought was, "Well, I don't know, how many people do you want to sit across from every year?"

How To Calculate A Minimum Fee Per Client Using The “Lifestyle Practice Revenue Model Generator” [06:12]

Carl: Totally. I love that you went there. I'd love to take you through what I call, the Lifestyle Practice Revenue Generator Model.

Michael: This sounds awesome. The Lifestyle Practice Revenue...

Carl: Revenue...

Michael: ...generator.

Carl: Sorry. Revenue Model Generator. Revenue Model Generator.

Michael: Model Generator. All right. Have you...

Carl: I was trying to put a deluxe in there.

Michael: ...trademarked or service marked this yet? Because this...

Carl: I probably should based on... Well anyway. So, yeah. The Lifestyle Practice Revenue Model Generator, and I was going to throw in deluxe. But here's what it is. There's really just 3 equations, and you've already outlined them. So, equation number one, personal income. So, we take personal income...and I'm just going to use round numbers around here, because I'm not smart enough. If I want a hundred thousand in personal income, then I need to make an assumption about the margin that the business operates on. And we're using rough numbers. So, let's just say we pick a 50% margin, and I guess this research could tell you what number to put in there, 50%.

Michael: You were, as a solo advisor, probably 50% to 70%. A little higher If you want to work with a small number of affluent clients in a really tight bunch.

Carl: Yeah. And we both know people that run much more profitable business than that. So, 50%. So, that comes up with revenue of [vocalization] 200,000. So, that's equation number one in the Lifestyle Practice Revenue Generator Model.

Michael: Revenue Model Generator.

Carl: Revenue Model Generator. Sorry, deluxe. And then the next equation is exactly what you said. What kind of life do I want to live? And to me, that's like how many and what type of client do I want to serve? So, in my head, I actually went and figured out what I wanted my life to look like first. So, I sort of blocked out the weeks of the year that I wanted off. Immediately I tried to block out Fridays. And so, then I was able to back into, if every client needed a meeting once a year, and I was just basing this on this research that was done at Merrill when I was there, around...they had this program called Supernova. So it was 12, 4, 2. Twelve contacts, four in-depth, two in-person.

Now, I didn't find I needed that many, so I changed it. I said 12, 2, 1. So, 12 monthly contact. And this is proactive contact on my part. This does not include them asking emails or anything like that. Obviously, there's much more touch points than that, but 12 times a year I'm going to reach out. Two of those are going to be in-depth, one of those is going to be in-person. So, that means an annual phone review, that's maybe 15 or 30 minutes. And 6 months later, the in-person meeting. So, when I had 12, 2, 1 and I knew what my calendar looked like, I could then plug in holes. "Well look, I can only meet with..." And I think the number I came up with, just to use round numbers, was a hundred.

Surprise, surprise. So, this seems to be like the lifestyle practice solo, hundred... It also seems to be the upper limit of somewhere around upper...depending on complexity, upper limit of service. So, a hundred. So, then I was, "Okay, you should do your math." So, what I wanted to build and why I wanted to build it, drove the type of client. So, if a client needed a quarterly in-depth meeting, they weren't a good fit for me because I couldn't fit it in my Lifestyle Revenue Model Generator. I remember meeting with somebody who had a crazy ton of money. He and his father-in-law had sold a business for a billion dollars and he owned 49% of it. And I went and met with him. I knew him pretty well. Yeah, it's not hard. I went and...

Michael: That's pretty good. That's swell at 1%.

Carl: Yeah. I went and met with him and I did the whole line, "I want to have more clients just like you." Because we were friends and I had helped him with some investment stuff, and then this transaction happened. And he was, "Wait, wait, wait. I know about your life. I know that you go on river trips, and you're gone for 2 weeks at a time. Do you know that I have 7 people volunteering to sleep with their BlackBerries?" This was back when the BlackBerry was a thing.

Michael: Yeah. Because he's merely a half billionaire, there's a lot of people.

Carl: Yeah. And he's like, "I don't even know if I need that, but I know that your service model is built for people who need a..." I called it the annual state-of-the-plan meeting. He's like, "I know about the annual state-of-the-plan meeting. You don't want me." So, that was reverse of how most people think about "I'll take anyone and make the business fit anyone." I was like, "No. I want to live this lifestyle, this is how I'm going to build a business. That means I want this number of clients." So, I would immediately know that probably working with 500 public school teachers wouldn't be a good fit for me, but it could be a good fit for somebody else.

So, I narrowed in, what ended up happening was, "Wait, a lot of the people I do the activities I enjoyed doing with, were ER doctors..." That's always handy actually, ER doctors, anesthesia, radiology, because they had control of their lifestyles. It turns out those are kind of lifestyle doctors because they don't have plant and equipment. They typically don't have terrible call. They call themselves lunchbox doctors, they show up with their lunchboxes, they do their work, they go home. And where I lived, they were in this part of the country because they enjoyed the same activities. If I was in Phoenix, they'd probably be a lot of golfers and tennis players, you know what I mean? So, back to our answer, was if...

Michael: Okay, so, personal income, what type of client do I want to serve? I think you said there were 3 equations.

Carl: Yeah. So, the last one is just divide the one by the other. If I can have a hundred clients and I need 200,000 in revenue, it's a pretty easy thing to figure out. My minimum fee has to be 2,000. Now those were not my numbers by the way. My numbers were much higher than that in terms of my goal numbers. But these are simple numbers that I don't have to pull out of a calculator. So, it's personal income divided by margin, equals revenue. Equation number one, set that number aside. How many clients do you want? What kind of thing do you want to build? How many clients do you want? Get that number. Divide the first number by the second number, that tells you your minimum fee. That's how I did it. Michael, I just have to stop and comment here. That Lifestyle Revenue Model Generator...I have to look down every time because I wrote it down. Deeply tactical. Come on, can I get some high fives for sharing...

How Scaling An Advisory Firm Versus Staying Solo Can Affect Revenue [13:36]

Michael: I appreciate you sharing a concrete tactic, because I know you like to just challenge us mentally to think differently. So, I will give you the shout-out. That was a very concrete tactic there. I'm assuming that means there's a strategic whack upside the head that's going to be coming in a few moments now, but I thank you for the tactic.

Carl: Yeah. If you would just all sprinkle some love in the comments for that, that would be so...just a little sprinkle. Just a little sprinkle.

Michael: Because this is a breakthrough for Carl, to share a concrete tactic.

Carl: I’m taking my hat off.

Michael: Not going so far as to sharing the 17-point wealth management audit list yet. But we've had a moment here, we need to acknowledge the moment. That...

Carl: A little sprinkle. So, that's the Lifestyle Practice Revenue Model Generator.

Michael: Deluxe.

Carl: Deluxe.

Michael: So, I do think there's an interesting framing that comes from this, because what I find for a lot of advisors who I've seen go through some version of this, they get to a number and say, "But I don't think that's going to work. I want to make 300. I think I can get an EBOC of 60%, so I need 500 gross. But in my ideal world I'd really work with no more than 25 clients. And I don't think I can get 25 clients at 20 grand a piece."

Carl: Yeah. Well the cool thing about the model we just laid out, is you now know what levers to play with. Either you're going to have to figure out how to get clients at 25 grand a piece somewhere in there. Which by the way, is totally possible, right?

Michael: Yeah.

Carl: Or you're going to have to adjust one of those other numbers, move the number of clients up, move the revenue goal down. You know what levers to play with now.

Michael: The second version of this I find that shows up, are people that go the other direction, "I wish I could help more people. I want to add more people in." Which either means... Look, you can volume yourself up as you want. In the example you gave Carl, "Look, if you want to go this route, serve 200 clients at a thousand dollars a piece. Come up with an hourly model where they just come in and ask you questions and you bill them for an hour or two of your time, and do 400 clients at $500 a piece, and you'll get to $200,000 revenue." There is a challenge I find for some of these models, which is you also need the time to market and get the clients. If you're going to build into this, I need some time to do the client things and I need some time to get the clients to do the client things for. And there are sometimes, just practically speaking, challenges around, "I don't know how to get that many clients for the people that want to do the high volume reach sort of thing." I do think it's powerful just when you put it in this frame.

And getting back to your earlier comment, just if you look overall at some of the industry practice management metrics that are out there, 60 to 80 clients per advisor is pretty common for most at the end of the day. I'm going to find by 40 to 50 client, and I'm assuming active clients you're in a meaningful relationship with, not the number of people to whom I once implemented a term insurance policy or did an IRA for. Just clienty clients, not former customers. Because I know some folks bang on, "What model you came in?" "I have 372 clients." "Yes. But you haven't talked to 272 of them in several years."

Carl: Yeah. Right. Those are customers.

Michael: Yes. I'm talking about clienty clients.

Carl: Clienty clients?

Michael: Clienty clients.

Carl: Nice. Yeah, I like that.

Michael: So, when you get down to that level of relationships, I find for most firms, somewhere by 40 or 50 clients, the sheer amount of tasky things that need to get done just to service and support clients, starts getting a little heavy, so we tend to try our administrative team help. That can get us to 60, 70, 80 clients, maybe 90. By then, there's just so many meetings to do, and meeting prep to do, and plan updates to do, and such, that we'll often hire an associate advisor. That can then get us to 120, 140, 150 clients across 2 advisors, like me and my associate. And you kind of end out in this realm of about 60 to 80 clients per advisor, or 120, 150 on a team, except you got some salaries to cover as well. So, the math gets a little bit messier because take-home pay divided into lower margins, because I've got overhead. But you can still get to the same thing.

One of the things I find interesting when you go that route though, and indirectly Carl, you highlighted it. It is recognizing that advisory firms that run pure solo, run some pretty astonishingly good margins. The industry label is EBOC. EBOC is earnings before owner's compensation. Just recognize to say, "Look, if I pull a big old business out that's got a zillion advisors, revenue and such, and I look at their profit margin, the profit margin tends to be their profit margin." All the people in the business are paid for all the various things that they do, and then the dollars left at the bottom, is the profitability of the firm.

When you're a solo, it's kind of weird to do that because technically part of the revenue is your job as the advisor, and then part of it is your profit as the owner. And yes. From a tax perspective, if you're an S corporation, you are supposed to pay yourself a reasonable compensation. But from a practical benchmarking the business perspective, when the owner's portion of the compensation is a really material portion of it and you can basically dial that number up and down as much as you want, a lot of firms literally just don't even look at the profit margin. They look at this number called EBOC, earnings before owner's compensation to say, "We're not even going to worry about how much you take in salary and how much you take off the bottom line. Just put it all in one big old bucket, and say that's your EBOC number."

So, some firms will run 50% as solo practices. More commonly I see 60% or 70% once you get past the initial startupy phase and you get to some critical massive clients. And some highly-leveraged firms that have really good systems or just work with a fairly small number of fairly large clients, you can get up to, I've seen 80%, I've seen 85%. It's a little hard to get much above that because just there's some level of overhead that you've got for the business, but you can get some pretty big numbers. The interesting thing to me though that crops up with that is, the moment you start hiring team members, those numbers start coming down a lot. You're not at 80-plus percent with team members, you're down like 60% or 70%.

Well, cool. Team members do leverage you, you can take on more clients, and do more things for them, and grow the business bigger. Well, I hope so. Because you're going to have lower margins and you have to take on more clients to generate more revenue just to get back to your same darn number in the first place. And it gets really interesting when you start looking at it from the perspective of, "What would my margins realistically be so I can back into what my revenue needs to be, so I can figure out what my average client needs to be, and just recognize how those numbers start shifting as you hire team members?" And it's, "Well, I hope we grow more because I'm kind of making the goal line further away."

Carl: Yeah. I was always...

Michael: Or conversely, "Well, now I have to have higher fee minimums and raise the number up, because I got staff overhead and payroll. And they only have so much time and capacity before they run out of room in their schedules, before I have to hire another, another staff member. And if I have to hire a second staff member because the first one is loaded up with clients that aren't actually very profitable, now I'm actually losing money because I'm hiring more staff." But that only crops up once you start adding people.

How Recognizing A Desired Lifestyle Can Help Determine A Minimum Fee Per Client [22:12]

Carl: I've always been astonished at this conversation. We've had this conversation, just how often people don't...and I know I didn't. How often we don't think through that. I just remember being blown away, because I never had any employees. I had some contract help, and I remember just being blown away by some of the numbers. And we know people like this, that run those kind of firms. Remember Dan Goldie?

Michael: Yeah.

Carl: Yeah. I remember Dan Goldie when he interviewed. I remember when he was trying to join certain big firms, get some of the services from... And he would say, "If you answer me, you need to hire people, our conversation's over." And...

Michael: For those who aren't familiar with Dan's story, he got to almost a billion dollars under management, as a pure solo advisor, literally zero staff. Giant...

Carl: I love that.

Michael: ...platform on the back end. He did outsource a bunch of stuff to a TAMP.

Carl: Outsourced everything. Everything he could...

Michael: Outsourced everything.

Carl: Except the value.

Michael: ...and got to a billion dollars under management as a pure solo. He had 270 clients that were $3 million or $4 million dollars a piece. And all he did was talk to clients all day long because that's what he liked doing, and he is really good at it.

Carl: I remember having this conversation and I can't remember who he was, but he was in Newport News, Virginia or something. And I remember the math was something like 700,000 in revenue, 85% margins. And I called him, "Man, your business must be really hard because you do everything yourself." And he's like, "I'm done by noon, 3 days a week. I don't know what the rest of you do." And the point is not necessarily whether that's true or not.

Michael: Because he had 20 or 30 clients that paid a lot of dollars and there just literally weren't that many clients.

Carl: Or 80 clients that just had very simple situations. He was delivering tons of value. He wasn't charging a really high fee, it was bottom end of industry average. Just below industry average. I just remember...and I'm not trying to make a point that that's the right way. I'm saying, going into it without doing the math leads to a lot of pain without realizing "Wait, in order to do that, I'm going to have to have 7 team members, I'm going to have to generate this much in revenue, or I could have this." And we both know people who have built great businesses that the answer is 7 team members, 12 team members, 20 team members. "I want to build that." Cool. But just go into it having done the math.

Michael: I'm going to have to commemorate this episode somewhere, where Carl is the one that said, "You have to do the math." You're just...

Carl: Listen, I play this...

Michael: I love this, I love this...

Carl: ...play this character that just draws with a Sharpie, but I know how to use a calculator. I didn't get through this whole thing without a...I got my 17 whatever over there in the drawer, HP 17Bii.

Michael: 12C, come on man, 12C.

Carl: Reverse or not?

Michael: Yes.

Carl: There you have it.

Michael: I will say though, the biggest constraint I find that crops up in practice when I have these conversations with advisors, as you said, the math's not that hard. The math gets fairly straightforward. I find for a lot of advisors, what they really end out doing is, they figure out the biggest clients they think they can get and then they start backing in how many clients they need in order to hit that goal. And kind of create this self-limiting belief that, "I don't know if I could get bigger clients. I don't know if I could find them. I don't know if I could get enough of them." Instead of saying, "No. This is what I want to do and this is what I want the business to look like. This is what I want the income to be. This is what the revenue has to be. This is how many clients I need to do it. And so, now I'm just going to focus all my time on getting those."

Carl: The power, I have zero doubt that anybody could decide whatever they want based on that Lifestyle Practice Revenue Model Generator Deluxe. You decide what you want and it...your example of 25 clients or 2,000 clients. You decide what you want and you take all the energy you would've spent in...dispersed energy and all sorts of recalculating, rethinking, "Do I need to hire this? Do I need to do that?" And you just narrow it in on, "I'm going to find those kind of clients." And I have zero doubt, I've seen it too many times where as soon as somebody decides...

Michael: It's basically Napoleon Hill, "Think and Grow Rich" framework of just, when you get that laser-like focus on exactly what you want your business to look like, you surprise yourself sometimes how quickly you can actually get it there when all of your mental energy goes to it. Because you actually commit to it, instead of sort of saying, "Well, that would be neat, but deep down, I'm not really sure I can get there."

Carl: Yeah. And we probably don't have time to talk about it, but I'm in the middle of Dan Sullivan's new book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x. I've heard him talk about that concept for 10 years. But the book is so good and it's so interesting to realize once you're ahead... And by the way, he's not saying 10x is easier than 2x in 1 year. It took him 17 years. The first one took 15 years, the next one took 17 years, to go from 400,000 to 4 million, and from 4 million to 40 million. We're talking 15 years. But it's the mindset. You're not thinking about how to do the double. And once that concentration happens, you start acting in different ways. And so, I think there's all sorts of ways to play that game too. By the way, that doesn't mean, "I want to serve only billionaires." That doesn't mean that. It doesn't mean, "I want to have a huge revenue number." It could mean, "I want to do it on fewer hours." It could mean, "I want to do it on my terms." It could mean, "I want to have this much impact." It doesn't have to be focused on the idea, "I want to serve bigger people." So I just think that's super powerful. So, that's to me, why it was so helpful to do the math.

Michael: Yeah. Well, I agree. It doesn't have to come from serving bigger people but I will say from the flip side, because just this is one of the things that we see quite drivingly when we really drill down and look at the numbers of these super-high income solo practices, they do tend to go upmarket. They do tend to be folks that are...I don't want to give a hard and fast minimum number, but like $5,000 of revenue per client and up to 10,000, 20,000. I've seen folks, they have million-dollar practices because they have 30 clients that have $3 million or $4 million dollars each, and it's a hundred-million-dollar practice, 30 clients and it takes a couple of days a week, not full-time to serve them. Because there's just literally not that many clients, as I put. They work 110% for a 50% client load, which means they only work 2 to 3 days a week.

Carl: So good. I'm in love with that stuff. So good.

Michael: Yeah. And so, I don't want to beat the whole drum around "Move upmarket, move upmarket, move upmarket." But just, I do think it is fair to recognize when you see the practices that have done that with some really big income and revenue numbers and very limited amounts of time, that is how they're doing it. And there is a particular power of, when you get some pretty affluent clients, it's astonishing how few of them you need to have a very economically profitable business.

Carl: For sure. That's amazing, man. Amazing.

Michael: Well, thank you, Carl.

Carl: Cheers Michael. Super fun.

Michael: Likewise.