Financial Advisor Success Podcast - Full Episode Archives

#FASuccess Ep 176: Understanding The Landscape Of Employee Vs. Independent Advisor Broker-Dealer Platforms, with Mindy Diamond

May 12, 2020 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 176th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Mindy Diamond. Mindy is the founder of Diamond Consultants, a recruiting firm that has been helping advisors evaluate and change their broker-dealer platforms for more than 20 years now. What's unique about Mindy, though, is her deep understanding of the full breadth of options that advisors can consider when evaluating the right platform to build their businesses - from wirehouses to regional broker-dealers, independent broker-dealers, and hybrid RIAs, and from employees to independent models.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about the range of choices that advisors have today in choosing a brokerage platform, the contrasting benefits and disadvantages of each platform depending on the types of clientele the advisor serves, how each varies in what they will pay in upfront recruiting bonuses versus higher payouts over time, and the way the independent RIA channel is increasingly replicating the brokerage channel as it shifts from simply being the most openly independent platform to instead ranging from employee tuck-ins to fully independent models as well.

We also talk about when advisors should and shouldn't look at switching to another broker-dealer platform. Why it's not enough to just feel the push that makes you want to leave your current platform but must also have a pull that makes you want to go find a new one, the most common pushes and pulls in practice that lead advisors to switch platforms, from “Lowest Common Denominator” (LCD) compliance frustrations to limitations on product choice, compensation changes or simply a desire to build more equity in your own business, and why it's so crucial for an advisor to understand and assess their own priorities first to have any chance of really picking the right platform for them.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Mindy shares her perspective on how brokerage platforms for advisors have changed over the years. Why the decision about what platform to choose is not as black and white as it once was and instead is more shades of gray, how the emergence of teaming (especially in wirehouses) may be better for advisor training but also makes it harder for advisors to change platforms when they want to, and why the most crucial question that advisors need to evaluate when figuring out whether they're in the right place or not, is simply to take a hard look at whether they really want to be an employee or independent in the first place because there are opportunities to succeed with both.

#FASuccess Ep 175: The Importance Of Family Dynamics To Make (Business) Time And Regain Control Of Work/Life Balance, with Travis Parry

May 5, 2020 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 175th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Dr. Travis Parry. Travis is the founder of Make Time Institute, which helps business owners, including financial advisors, to regain control of their time and achieve better work-life balance. What's unique about Travis, though, is that he spent nearly a decade working as a financial advisor as well and living firsthand the challenges of balancing the demands of an advisory firm with the needs of his family and home life before going back to school to earn a Ph.D. in family relations and human development and to study what it really takes to achieve a better work-life balance.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about Travis' "Make Time" approach to creating better work-life balance by overcoming what he calls the three myths of time management. The first myth is that there isn't actually such a thing as achieving balance but instead, it's better to identify your goals and values and to ensure that your time is prioritized to align with them. Second, that the key to regaining control of time isn't about being more productive in the work that you do, but again, about learning to prioritize what is really the most important and impactful work you should be doing with your time every day and letting go of the rest. And third, why, in the long-term, the key as a business owner isn't about just investing in your own personal development as a leader in the business, but in what Travis calls couples’ development. Because the reality is that for any advisor with a spouse and children, personal development and habit change can only occur if your spouse is on board with the change and you can develop together as a couple.

We also talk about Travis's own journey through the advisory business. How he started out in a major life insurance firm to leverage the training and resources in working with small business owners, why he decided to transition to the independent channel in order to focus more of his work on helping small business owners with their time and broader businesses than just the traditional financial services products, how a combination of family tragedy and the financial crisis derailed his advisory firm, and the way those disruptions ultimately led him to find what has become his life's work.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Travis shares why an inability to evolve an advisor's own time management systems is often one of the biggest blocking points that prevent a firm from growing and scaling, why he thinks Maslow's hierarchy of working towards self-actualization is wrong and how family plays a crucial role, and how the recent disruptions of the coronavirus may, for many advisors, end out reinforcing the exact kind of restructuring of time and priorities that Travis advocates in the first place.

#FASuccess Ep 174: Leveraging Zapier And PreciseFP To Weave Together Independent Advisor Open Architecture, with Shanna Tingom

April 28, 2020 07:09 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 174th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Shanna Tingom. Shanna is the founder of Heritage Financial Strategies, a dually registered advisory firm located near Phoenix, Arizona, that oversees $50 million of assets under management for nearly 250 middle-market clients. What's unique about Shanna, though, is the way she's been able to weave together her advisor technology stack to heavily automate key processes throughout her firm to service 250 clients efficiently and did so by not using industry-standard CRM systems.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about Shanna's unique advisor technology stack. Why she chose to use marketing automation provider HubSpot for not only her website, but her core CRM system and business workflows, the way she's adopted Zapier as a solution to integrate HubSpot into industry or software providers, and why she selected PreciseFP and not her own CRM system to become the core data hub for her advisory business.

We also talk about Shanna's journey through the advisory business itself. Why she's thankful she started out at a large financial services firm for their training and infrastructure, why she ultimately chose to make the transition to become an independent advisor instead, the difficult challenges that Shanna faced when going out on her own and losing the existing infrastructure and premier brand that a large firm provides, and how she selected Cambridge to become her new independent broker-dealer platform for the future.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Shanna shares the moment where she was so unhappy in her advisory firm that she was about to quit altogether, how delegating investment management to third-party TAMPs helped restore her own happiness and well-being, the way she now structures her AUM and planning fees to incorporate investment advice, financial planning advice, and the cost of third-party providers, and the mental trick of drawing lines in the sand that Shanna uses to help herself make changes that she knows will be difficult to make.

#FASuccess Ep 173: Growing To $250M In Five Years By Crafting A More Specialized Client Experience, with Andrew Leonard

April 21, 2020 07:03 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 173rd episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Andrew Leonard. Andrew is the founder of Geometric Wealth Advisors, an independent RIA based in the Washington, D.C. area that oversees nearly $250 million of assets under management for 110 client households.

What's unique about Andrew, though, is his decision to focus into a unique niche serving the partners of the big three strategy consulting firms, Bain, McKinsey, and BCG, propelling his firm to organically add almost $200 million of net new assets in just 5 years almost entirely from a single white paper he wrote for his niche, and the ongoing one-meeting-close referrals he's been able to generate as a now recognized expert in that niche.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about what it really means to customize the financial planning process and experience to a particular type of niche clientele. The unique opportunities and challenges in working with management consultants who may make more than $1 million a year and save $250,000 annually into their portfolios but have been trained to analyze and scrutinize financial models and projections, how Andrew evolved his financial planning process to focus almost entirely on live interactive presentations of financial planning models using eMoney's Decision Center and eschewing the written plan altogether, and how Andrew combines in-person and virtual delivery to a clientele who are largely distance-based and spread across the country, and why Andrew ultimately decided to stick with the traditional assets under management model for a somewhat non-traditional niche clientele.

We also talk about why and how Andrew decided to pursue this type of clientele in the first place. Why he ultimately found it easier and more personally rewarding to work with high-income management consultants than the traditional retiree with significant retirement assets to manage, how he selected and narrowed down the type of niche clientele he wanted to pursue, the white paper marketing strategy he used to accelerate his growth after his first 10 niche clients, and why he finds that when focused on a niche, the biggest challenge is no longer how to market and attract high-quality clients, but the difficulties in finding the right kind of financial advisor talent to service that rapidly growing base of clientele instead.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Andrew shares why he found it so emotionally draining to work with retired clients, the real-world challenges of deciding to pivot from what had been a more generalist practice for his first seven years into this deep niche focus, and the unique cost-benefit analysis tool that he created on his website specifically to demonstrate the value of a financial advisor to his hyper-analytical clientele.

#FASuccess Ep 172: Finding The Intersection Of Fulfillment And Profitability With A Niche Of Special Needs Families, with Minoti Rajput

April 14, 2020 07:06 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 172nd episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Minoti Rajput. Minoti is the Founder and President of Secure Planning Strategies, a hybrid advisory firm based near Detroit, Michigan, that oversees nearly $300 million of assets under management for 350 client households.

What's unique about Minoti, though, is that she's built her advisory firm by crafting a deep specialization in working with families with special needs children, and creating a truly multi-generational clientele in serving both the parents of those children and supporting the special needs trusts for those children long after their parents may pass away.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about what it really means to work with a niche of special needs families. The way Minoti structures her fees with the combination of an upfront complexity-based planning fee that may be the entirety of the relationship for some clients, the ongoing AUM fee she charges to work with more affluent families for ongoing special needs clients, the limitations of doing niche-based financial planning in traditional planning software, the need to use Word and Excel to create more custom plans, and how Minoti has been able to systematize and create repeatable expertise to keep even her custom-written financial plans very efficient to create and deliver.

We also talk about how Minoti built her niche in the special needs community itself. How she gathered the requisite expertise, it takes to understand the myriad of Federal, state, and local programs available to support special needs families, the unique marketing opportunity she's been able to create working with school systems where as many as 10% of students have some kind of special education needs, where Minoti draws the line between giving advice to special needs families but not serving as their special needs attorney, and how Minoti handles the real-world compliance challenges in providing this kind of specialized advice while being supervised by a broker-dealer compliance department.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Minoti shares why even though she's gone deep into the specialization of serving special needs families successfully, she still keeps a client base where almost 50% of her clients are generalist and not niche clients, the most misunderstood aspects of what it takes to be profitable and grow scalably when serving a niche clientele like special needs families, and the resources she recommends, including books to read, organizations to join, and designations to pursue for other advisors who want to pursue such a rewarding and fulfilling niche as well.

#FASuccess Ep 171: Transitioning From Successful Wholesaling To Financial Advisors To Becoming One Instead, with Tom Kennedy

April 7, 2020 07:06 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 171st episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Tom Kennedy. Tom is a wealth advisor at Global Wealth Advisors, a hybrid advisory firm based in Houston, Texas where Tom works with a base of nearly 400 clients.

What's unique about Tom, though, is that he made the transition into being a financial advisor from a successful 10-year career of working as a wholesaler to advisors, allowing him to get intimately familiar with the advisory firms in his area and network his way to a firm that was acquiring a book of 400 clients at the exact moment that Tom was ready to make a transition.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about what it's like to shift from the wholesaler business to the advisory business. How the required skillset of wholesalers to meet with and talk to lots of people is a natural fit for working as an advisor as well, the way the advisory business allows for more and deeper relationships than the traditional volume of required meetings for wholesalers, the appeal of shifting into an advisory business where every year doesn't start back at $0 the way the commission-based wholesaling business does, and the real-world challenges of making a transition away from a wholesaling job that typically pays far more in the short run than most advisory firms could feasibly offer, but why it was still appealing to Tom to make the shift anyway, for its long-run potential in the advisory business.

We also talk about how Tom actually made the transition itself. Why he decided to get a CFP certification while he was still working as a wholesaler, the way he approached firms to interview for opportunities, how he assessed the various firms that he was coming in contact with to figure out which would be the best for him to work with as an advisor, and why, even as someone with deep experience and a natural skillset for business development, it was still more appealing for him to find a role where he could take over an existing book of clients and not just start developing his own client base from scratch.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Tom shares why, despite the long-term earning potential of the advisory business, he found it appealing first and foremost as a change in work-life balance from the 10-year grind as a wholesaler, the biggest surprise to him in transitioning from an employee-wholesaler model to becoming an independent advisor, about what it really means to be an independent business owner, and the lessons that Tom incorporated into starting his advisory firm based on what he'd seen as best practices in other firms from all his wholesaling years.

#FASuccess Ep 170: Eschewing The Industry’s ‘Growth Imperative’ And Crafting Your Advisory Business With Intention Instead, with Patrick Tucker

March 31, 2020 07:01 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 170th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Patrick Tucker. Patrick is the founder of True Measure Wealth Management, an independent RIA based in Omaha, Nebraska, that oversees nearly $150 million of assets under management for 89 client families. What's unique about Patrick, though, is his background in business operations and financial management, from having started his career at UPS, and how he's translated those business management skills to run his own advisory firm. Not necessarily to grow and scale the largest business he can, but to very intentionally craft an advisory firm to achieve his own personal goals instead.

In this episode, we talk about how Patrick built his very intentionally designed advisory firm. The two niches he forms with executives from transportation companies and small local business entrepreneurs like himself, how he splits his advisory fee structure between AUM fees for clients with portfolios he can manage and three tiers of flat planning fees from $8,000 to $16,000 a year for the clients in this niche who may have significant wealth but not in a liquid form to manage. The key business metrics that Patrick focuses on to ensure he's spending his time and the business resources properly, and the three P's – personality, participation, and profitability – that Patrick uses to evaluate each prospective client to decide if he wants to work with them in the first place.

We also talk about Patrick's journey through the advisory business, why he decided to transition from the independent broker-dealer environment to the RIA channel, how he was ultimately able to nearly triple his business in the first two years after he dropped his affiliation with FINRA to go fee-only, why Patrick chooses to use contractors and outsourcers and to keep his internal team very lean, and how Patrick does regular process reviews internally with his staff member to evaluate whether they're really doing the right thing for clients and whether those things are really being done in the most efficient manner possible.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Patrick shares how he overcame the growth imperative pressure that the industry tends to put on all of us as advisors that we have to grow, grow, grow; even if we don't really want or need to grow anymore for our own personal goals. The way Patrick's own path changed by getting involved with Strategic Coach, and why he ultimately decided to launch his own coaching business for advisors to teach them how to craft their own intentionally designed businesses to serve their own goals as Patrick did with his own firm.

#FASuccess Ep 169: Combatting Advisory Fee Compression By Unbundling Investment Management And Financial Planning Fees With Alexandra Levi

March 24, 2020 07:07 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 169th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Alexandra Levi. Alex is the Founder and Managing Partner of Element Financial Group, a hybrid RIA with the Commonwealth platform that oversees nearly $430 million of assets under advisement for 170 clients. What's unique about Alex, though, is that, with a firm providing both investment management and financial planning services, she, in fact, has been able to grow her revenue to be almost fifty-fifty between the two with a $4,000 to $11,000 a year annual retainer fee for financial planning. And that she did so specifically as a strategy to combat the risk of fee compression by more clearly and separately articulating the value and the price of each service.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about Alex's approach to financial planning and how she prices it with her clients. The way she does a demo of the eMoney advisor’s dashboard in her prospect meetings with potential clients to show them the way she'll keep their lives organized on an ongoing basis. The way Alex shortened the upfront financial planning process with clients to just two meetings but then conducts ongoing quarterly meetings with all clients in recognition that financial planning is much more about the ongoing planning process than the upfront plan itself.

And how, thanks to technology, Alex's quarterly meetings with her clients have increasingly become virtual while leveraging video conferencing software, but how the reduction in physical in-person meetings hasn't impeded her retention rate that remains in the high 90% range for her multi-thousand dollar a year annual retainer fee.

We also talk about Alex's journey through the advisory business itself. Why she chose to start out her career working for a major mutual life insurance firm instead of a wirehouse. The reason she ultimately decided to make a pivot to the independent broker-dealer channel for back-office compliance and other infrastructure that a broker-dealer can provide. Why she hired an independent recruiter to help her find the right BD to work with. About the partnership she almost entered into with another advisory firm for support but had to bail out of at the last minute. And the way she eventually found her ideal business partner, so she didn't have to be a lone wolf responsible for everything and not feel so alone in building her now jointly-owned advisory business.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Alex shares her perspective on why she thinks time in the business is such a major determinant of success. Why it's so crucial to be proactive about networking early – and always – in an advisory career. And why she views the entrepreneurial opportunity of owning and building your own advisory business to be especially appealing for women who want to control the direction and duration of their careers.

#FASuccess Ep 168: Building An Advisory Firm That Can Be Sold Even When Your Name Is Still On The Door, with Erin Botsford

March 17, 2020 07:16 am 4 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 168th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Erin Botsford. Erin is the founder of Botsford Financial Group, a hybrid RIA with the LPL platform that oversees nearly $1 billion in assets under management with offices in Dallas and Atlanta. What's unique about Erin, though, is the way she built and evolved her firm over the years, from being entirely centered around herself as the lead advisor, to the end where even still having her name on the door of the firm, Botsford Financial Group, presented no impediment at all to her selling the firm and transitioning the clients. Because in the end, it's far more about the mentality of the founder to build the business beyond themselves than how they happen to name the firm.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Erin built her advisory firm over the past 30 years, the transformation she went through after spending the first 10 years of her career working hard to grow to $300,000 in gross revenue and then, after a breakthrough coaching session, made a deliberate shift to transition herself from lead advisor of the firm to being rainmaker and CEO instead, and nearly 10X’ed the growth of the firm in barely three years. How Erin developed herself into a lead rainmaker role for the firm after self-admittedly not being a natural business developer and the way that Erin balanced letting go of being the lead in client relationships but still maintaining vigilant oversight of the firm and know that the work was being done properly for clients.

We also talk about how Erin actually shifted control of client relationships and execution of the firm, the three-meeting approach she used to transition clients, next-generation advisors who would manage the relationship in the future, the after-action meetings that Erin conducted with her advisors after the client meetings to instill lessons about how to better manage those relationships, and the steps that she took to initially institutionalize all the firm's processes and procedures as someone who isn't naturally inclined towards writing out her own processes and procedures.

And be certain to listen to the end where Erin shares why she ultimately decided to sell her advisory firm, the reason she felt drawn back to the advisor industry to teach other advisors how she built her firm by tying it to one of her charitable passions, and the way that Erin came to embrace the radical authenticity approach that she now takes in everything she does after a breakthrough meeting early with a client whose child was suffering through a terrible accident similar to something Erin herself went through as a teenager.

#FASuccess Ep 167: Creating More Buy-In To Change Financial Behaviors With A Life Planning Approach, with Scott Frank

March 10, 2020 07:05 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 167th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Scott Frank. Scott is the founder of Stone Steps Financial, an independent RIA based in Southern California that has quickly grown to 67 clients and more than $400,000 of annualized revenue in just 5 years.

What's unique about Scott, though, is the way he's evolved his advisory firm from a highly technical base as both a CFA charterholder and a CFP certificant to a financial planning approach with clients built around George Kinder's five-step EVOKE life planning process, which Scott helps clients implement using all his technical knowledge.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Scott incorporates life planning questions into the first three meetings of his financial planning process. The reasons why he finds some of George Kinder's life planning questions to be so powerful as a way to really understand clients’ goals and objectives to plan towards, the way he creates buy-in from clients into the financial planning process to get them to actually implement the recommended strategies at the end, and where traditional financial planning software intersects with the life planning approach.

We also talk about how Scott has built a business around his life planning approach. The reason he chooses to bill on a client's holistic assets under advisement and not just the assets he manages directly, how he's simplified his pricing and billing processes with a flat fee schedule of 1% for the first $3 million on all assets under advisement and simply updates the pricing once every 2 years, and the way he's built his clientele with the combination of local search engine optimization and generating referrals from other advisory firms in the area that have even higher minimums than he does.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Scott shares why he hired a financial planner himself to work with his family, how he developed his own life planning goals that led him to take the leap and start his own independent firm after nearly 10 years in the business, and how he used that vision of his family's life planning goals to give himself fee confidence to start charging what his advice was really worth.

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#FASuccess Ep 176: Understanding The Landscape Of Employee Vs. Independent Advisor Broker-Dealer Platforms, with Mindy Diamond

#FASuccess Ep 175: The Importance Of Family Dynamics To Make (Business) Time And Regain Control Of Work/Life Balance, with Travis Parry

#FASuccess Ep 174: Leveraging Zapier And PreciseFP To Weave Together Independent Advisor Open Architecture, with Shanna Tingom

#FASuccess Ep 173: Growing To $250M In Five Years By Crafting A More Specialized Client Experience, with Andrew Leonard

#FASuccess Ep 172: Finding The Intersection Of Fulfillment And Profitability With A Niche Of Special Needs Families, with Minoti Rajput

#FASuccess Ep 171: Transitioning From Successful Wholesaling To Financial Advisors To Becoming One Instead, with Tom Kennedy

#FASuccess Ep 170: Eschewing The Industry’s ‘Growth Imperative’ And Crafting Your Advisory Business With Intention Instead, with Patrick Tucker

#FASuccess Ep 169: Combatting Advisory Fee Compression By Unbundling Investment Management And Financial Planning Fees With Alexandra Levi

#FASuccess Ep 168: Building An Advisory Firm That Can Be Sold Even When Your Name Is Still On The Door, with Erin Botsford

#FASuccess Ep 167: Creating More Buy-In To Change Financial Behaviors With A Life Planning Approach, with Scott Frank

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