Financial Advisor Success Podcast - Full Episode Archives

#FASuccess Ep 097: Transitioning From Financial Coach to Financial Planner Serving Underserved Communities With Phuong Luong

November 6, 2018 07:05 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 97th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Phuong Luong. Phuong is the founder of Just Wealth, an independent RIA specifically focused on working with younger clients in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are still in the wealth building phase of their careers, and with whom Phuong meets entirely virtually using video conferencing tools, even though most of her clients are actually in the Boston area where she's located as well.

What's unique about Phuong, though, is not just her virtual practice, but that she comes from a background of doing financial coaching and counseling, and as a result, more than half her practice is working with clients who are below the median household income in Massachusetts, about $75,000 a year, for whom she charges an ongoing monthly retainer fee of 1.5% of their monthly income.

In this episode, we talk in depth about what it's like doing financial planning for lower and middle-income families. Why they really are willing to pay for financial planning advice despite being of limited means, how the focus typically is not actually on budgeting and household cash flow planning, but on building up their balance sheet instead, and why until those clients build up their personal balance sheet, it's necessary to understand the community balance sheet of local programs and resources to help.

We also talk about the progression from financial education to financial coaching to financial counseling to financial planning. The differences in each of those terms, not just in regards to the income or affluence of the clients being served, but the mindset of the educator or coach or counselor or advisor working with the client, and the appeal for someone with a financial coaching background like Phuong to come into the financial planning world in the first place.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Phuong talks about the challenging ways that stereotypes about race and low-income individuals can become blocking points to giving them effective advice. How many of the financial challenges of working with people of color in her community can be traced back to institutional and government policies from decades ago that still have lasting effects in the compounding of income and wealth inequality, which in turn may be both limiting the reach of financial planning to minority communities, and our ability as a profession to attract people of color to become financial planners in the first place.

So whether you're interested in learning about actions you can take to help improve diversity in the financial planning profession, Phuong’s unique career journey that brought her to financial planning or how she's built a successful business helping underserved communities, then we how you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

#FASuccess Ep 096: The 7 Pillars Of Running An Advisory Firm Like A Real Business With Stephanie Bogan

October 30, 2018 07:01 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 96th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Stephanie Bogan. Stephanie is a successful practice management consultant who built and sold her first consulting firm and now has gone on to found a new one called the Limitless Adviser Coaching Program.

What's unique about Stephanie, though, is that despite the fact that she doesn't need to build another practice management coaching business for advisors, she's doing so anyways as a means to have a greater positive impact on the advisor community, and in the process, teaching other advisors how to build their businesses to achieve their ideal outcomes as well.

In this episode, we talk in depth about what Stephanie calls the seven pillars or simply the 7P's of building and running a successful advisory firm. Starting with the key step of planning for what outcome you want to create for your firm, then figuring out how to position the firm to reach the right clientele, and then following through with the packaging, promotion, process, platforms, and people that are needed to implement the vision. Because the irony is that, while most financial advisors are independent entrepreneurs, very little practice management in the industry actually teaches the real methods to build and run a business.

However, we also talk about how in the end improving the methods in your advisory business really actually creates any real breakthroughs, as most of the time the ceilings we hit in our businesses are not actually just a function of how we're doing the business or whether we're doing it wrong, instead, most growth ceilings are actually a mindset problem. And once you make the decision to change your mindset, the status quo, and do something differently, it suddenly opens new doors to execute the business differently. And it's then walking through the newly opened doorways that can really create business breakthroughs.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Stephanie talks about how in the long run the key to success and satisfaction with your advisory business isn't really about the size of the firm or what you build at all, it's about figuring out what outcome will make you happy in the business and then crafting a pathway to achieve that vision. Because, just as we as advisors experience with our own clients, few people find satisfaction even with tremendous financial success until you can articulate the non-financial goals you're really trying to achieve in the first place.

#FASuccess Ep 095: The Never-Ending Process Of Iteratively Building An Advisory Firm with Linda Lubitz Boone

October 23, 2018 07:05 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 95th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Linda Lubitz Boone. Linda is the founder of Lubitz Financial Group, an independent RIA in the Miami area that oversees nearly $250 million of assets under management for 125 affluent clients.

What's unique about Linda, though, is that despite having reached a phenomenal level of success building a $250 million AUM firm over the past 25 years, she continues to proactively iterate on and make changes to improve the advisory firm, from the service provider she uses to support the business, to the very business model itself.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Linda continues to evolve her advisory firm. From exploring a potential shift from charging an AUM fee plus an upfront planning fee, into a consolidated income plus net worth retainer fee instead, as a way to shift the focus of clients away from the portfolio and towards growing their entire net worth instead, the decision to outsource her back-office investment operations to a third party provider but without fully transitioning to a TAMP, and how Linda is shifting her own role in the business to transition new and existing clients to her next-generation advisors while formalizing a business development training process for the firm.

We also talk about how Linda got started in the first place. The way she built her business in the early years with the philosophy of, "Meet a lot of people, answer the phones quickly, and do what you say you're going to do," why it's so crucial to plan to cover two to three years of personal living expenses when starting an advisory firm, even if you're confident it's going to succeed, and how joining or even forming your own study group to have a network of peers to hold you accountable to your own business plan can help keep the advisory business focused and growing.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Linda shares how she made a key personal life transition in the midst of growing her business, splitting 50% of her time between her home base in Miami and out to San Francisco, where her then-new husband's firm was based, and how in the end, even though we're often so fearful about how existing clients will react to a change, in reality, once clients trust us, they tend to stick with us and even support us in our own life changes as advisors.

And so with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast with Linda Lubitz Boone.

#FASuccess Ep 094: Crafting Your Optimal Solo Practice By Simply Charging What You’re Worth With James Osborne

October 16, 2018 07:03 am 2 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 94th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is James Osborne. James is the founder of Bason Asset Management, a solo advisory firm based in the Denver suburbs that oversees more than $225 million of assets under management.

What's unique about James, though, is the unusual way that he structured his advisory business, with a simple flat fee of $4,800 per client regardless of their assets, which has allowed him to build a high-margin solo practice with just 80 clients generating nearly $400,000 of revenue for the firm at the age of just 35 years old.

In this episode, we talk in depth about why James decided to structure his firm using this flat fee approach in lieu of the AUM model. How the design of his business model makes it possible for him to generate a target of his exact income potential as he reaches client capacity, the way he handles situations where his flat fee would be substantially lower than what another advisor's AUM fee might be for prospective clients with a lot of assets and net worth, and the reason that he chose to deliberately build a business model that fits his personal lifestyle and family goals.

We also talk about what it really means to reach personal capacity as a financial advisor. The challenging trade-offs that start to emerge as advisory firms try to grow beyond the individual capacity of the founder, why it is that beyond a certain point, doubling the number of clients and revenue at the practice has almost no impact on the take-home compensation of an advisor, and the reason that so many solo advisory firms will actually generate far more value for their founders by staying small even if the practice is never sold.

And be certain to listen to the end, where James talks about how he's adjusting the way he meets with and takes on prospective clients as he approaches his personal capacity, and what he plans to do to maintain his high-income lifestyle practice once he reaches that threshold.

So, whether you're interested in learning about some of the benefits of a flat-fee structure, how James approaches investment management, or why most advisors are scaling their practices all wrong, then we hope you enjoy this episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast.

#FASuccess Ep 093: Building A High-Income Lifestyle Practice Efficiently By Running It Like A Real Business with Sunit Bhalla

October 9, 2018 07:07 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 93rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Sunit Bhalla. Sunit is the founder of OakTree Financial Planning, a highly efficient solo advisory firm based in Colorado that oversees more than $40 million in assets under management.

What's unique about Sunit though is the way he's been able to build to nearly $300,000 in revenue with a whopping 85% profit margin as a career changer who works with just 17 affluent clients in a hyper-targeted niche of engineers, as a former engineer himself. In this episode we talk in-depth about how Sunit has built his hyper-efficient solo practice with the relentless focus on staying focused: The technology tools he uses to stay efficient in delivering services to clients, his simple fee structure to keep even his billing process simple and efficient, and why he offers all of his prospective clients one and only one comprehensive financial planning and investment management service that they can either take or leave.

We also talk about Sunit's unique financial planning process with clients, the key questions he asks at the beginning of each client relationship to really understand their needs, the six meaning process he uses that starts with a discussion about goals and exploring possibilities, even before gathering all the client's data. And how he ultimately delivers the financial planning results to his sophisticated engineer clients, not by producing and printing out detailed financial projections for them, but using his planning software interactively to model their various what-if scenarios live on the spot.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Sunit talks about how he went about building his unique lifestyle practice the way that he did, the way he very deliberately manages his lifestyle practice as a business, and why he isn't concerned at all that his advisory firm may not necessarily have any salable value at the end.

So whether you're interested in learning about building a lifestyle practice, how to make sure you're only working with your ideal clients, or about maintaining a healthy work-life balance, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

#FASuccess Ep 092: Taking More Vacation Time By Standardizing Workflows And Processes In Your Advisor CRM with Jennifer Goldman

October 2, 2018 07:08 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 91st episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Jennifer Goldman. Jennifer runs an eponymous practice management consulting firm based in Boston that works intimately with half a dozen advisory firms at a time on their operations, technology, workflows, and processes.

What's unique about Jennifer, though, is that, before she began working as a practice management consultant on operations issues, she had a career as a financial advisor herself and then transitioned to operations leadership roles at two more advisory firms before eventually deciding to go out on her own as a consultant to work with even more advisory firms and operations.

In this episode, we talk in depth about what it really means to adopt and implement workflows and processes in your advisory firm. Why an advisor CRM system should operate as the central hub of the advisory business, the 100-client capacity and 5 employee capacity in multi-advisory firms that eventually forces every growing advisory business to start formally adopting standardized processes and procedures, and why exactly it's so important to do so in order to sustainably grow and scale an advisory business, or simply to finally find the time to take a vacation as an advisory firm founder.

We also talk about Jennifer's operation consulting process with firms, that starts with formalizing the roles and responsibilities of everyone in the firm, and then goes to a technology audit of all the tools the advisory firm already has, and only then begins to focus on how to better integrate the available technology tools, recognizing that in today's environment, the real blocking point for most firms on technology is not a need to get better tech tools, but simply a need to adopt better systems and processes to use the technology the firm already has.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Jennifer shares her own journey of building a consulting practice into a multi-consultant business, and why she ultimately decided to scale the business back to his solo consulting firm, not because it wasn't feasible to scale the consulting business, but simply because in the end, she wanted to right-size the business to let her spend less time managing people and more time working with the advisory firm clients that she wanted to work with in the first place. A lesson I think that is particularly relevant for any advisor who finds themselves unhappy in a successful business because they're spending more time in management and less time with clients than they ever expected when they first launched the firm.
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#FASuccess Ep 091: Increasing The Value Of Advice By Focusing On Life-Centered Planning For Transitions Not Goals with Mitch Anthony

September 25, 2018 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 91st episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Mitch Anthony. Mitch is the founder of an eponymous training and coaching firm for financial advisors on how to ask the right questions to have better conversations with clients.

What's unique about Mitch, though, is his truly unique gift for finding the right words for effective client conversations. From describing the value of financial planning itself based on the six principles of helping clients with their organization, accountability, objectivity, proactivity, education, and partnership, to simply making the point that in the end, the role of a good financial planner is to help clients find the balance between vocation and vacation and ensure that clients prepare so they don't have to repair instead.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of language in financial planning. The difference between having good rapport with clients and really building a relationship with them, why asking clients the right questions is all about engaging them by making them feel like they're answering the questions they've always wanted to talk about anyway, and why the best way to demonstrate the ongoing value of financial planning is not about helping clients to reach their goals, but instead helping them to prepare for and then navigate the never-ending stream of transitions that life throws at them anyway, which are also great opportunities for advisors to demonstrate our value and grow our businesses because money goes in motion when life goes into transition.

We also talk about how the real value of a financial advisor should be measured by their ability to impact a client's return on life and whether they're living the best life they can with the money they have, rather than the traditional focus on benchmarking and advisor's return on investments, which as Mitch puts it, Standard and Poor's is a poor standard for measuring value, how the life-centered planning approach helps to address the common client question of, "What have you done for me lately," and the platform that Mitch is building aptly called ROL Advisor, to provide coaching and tracking tools that advisors can use with their clients to demonstrate these ongoing values.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Mitch shares his key insight for how new advisors, in particular, can set themselves on a better track to long-term success by doing whatever it takes to, as he puts it, surround themselves with greatness and find opportunities to learn from best advisors they can before starting out on their own.

So whether you're interested in learning about how "life-centered" planning improves client relationships, the "major motivator" for saving (other than retirement), or the best way to demonstrate the ongoing value of financial planning, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

#FASuccess Ep 090: Scaling An Advisory Firm Beyond Yourself By Systematizing The Soft Skills With Julie Murphy

September 18, 2018 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 90th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Julie Murphy. Julie is the founder and chief visionary officer of JMC Wealth Management, a dual-registered advisory firm in Chicago with a team of 7 that serves more than 200 active clients with $200 million of AUM, on top of generating nearly $300,000 a year in recurring financial planning fees.

What's unique about Julie, though, is her focus on what she calls "financial healing," with financial planning conversations that are heavily focused around the intersections of money and our emotions and our energy flow to the point that Julie is not only traditional strategic alliances with attorneys and CPAs, but also has what she calls more esoteric strategic alliances with psychologists and meditation specialists as well.

In this episode, we talk about how Julie has structured her unique advisory firm practice with a combination of quarterly retainer fees that clients pay for ongoing financial planning, separate implementation revenue that clients pay to have their portfolios managed as well, Julie's three-meeting planning process and how she charges for each, and the software tools that Julie uses to implement her process.

We also talk about how she's been able to generate a steady flow of new clients. How Julie authored a book to establish and demonstrate her expertise, the way that she separated her writing activities into an outside business activity to manage the compliance concerns, the way she built up 50,000 followers on Facebook and the kinds of posts that she's found to be most successful, and how Julie was able to accelerate her success and growth by doing what she calls "letting her freak flag fly," by simply being her authentic self and allowing clients who are interested in what she has to offer to be drawn to her rather than trying to advertise out to them, because in the end, most advisors attract and develop best rapport with clients who are a reflection of themselves anyways.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Julie discusses how she's systematizing the soft skills of her financial planning process to train new advisors. How she aims to transition all of her clients to other advisors so she can do the part of the process that she enjoys most, which is meeting with and working with the challenges of new clients, and why she decided to write another book not just for marketing purposes, but also because the process of writing about her planning approach is actually helping her to figure out how best to systematize it.

So whether you're interested in learning about Julie's "esoteric" strategic alliances, how she is creating a process to systematize the soft skills of financial planning to build a strong bench of like-minded advisors, or how's she's managed to gather 50,000 followers on Facebook, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

#FASuccess Ep 089: The Truth About Advisor Marketing And The Scalable Delivery Of Financial Advice with Ric Edelman

September 11, 2018 07:07 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 89th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Ric Edelman. Ric is the founder and executive chairman of Edelman Financial Services, a mega-independent RIA with more than $22 billion of assets under management with 165 advisors serving 36,000 clients across 43 office locations from coast-to-coast.

What's unique about Ric, though, is that he started out like any other financial advisor, selling mutual funds in the 1980s as an individual advisor, doing financial education seminars to local elementary school PTA groups to meet prospective clients and just trying to survive. But in the 30 years since, Ric grew an advisory firm that far outgrew his own capacity to serve clients, ultimately building a marketing machine that brought in a whopping 45,000 prospects to the firm last year alone.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Ric grew and scaled Edelman Financial over time. How they've been able to build a $22 billion firm while staying focused squarely on the mass affluent and not increasing their asset minimums, why Ric is adamant about keeping the firm's minimums as low as $5,000 for a new client, how the firm successfully justifies a fee schedule that still starts at 2% AUM fee, and why he considers it the firm's job to bring in new clients and the role of advisors to simply service those clients rather than being burdened with the time and effort of getting their own.

We also talk about how Ric scaled and evolved the marketing of the firm over the years. From starting out conducting seminars to local PTA groups then getting a guest spot on a radio show that ultimately turned into a radio show of his own, which led him to writing a book, followed by eight more, and now is expanding digitally as well, all with the theme of providing free financial education to those who need it, and recognizing that many will simply be helped with the information, but a few will inevitably reach out to the firm to ask for help and become prospects in the process.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Ric talks about how he'd build his marketing differently if he were starting fresh today, why he sees such an opportunity with Edelman Financial's merger with Financial Engines, and why he believes that most advisors are still grossly underestimating how much the best advice for clients and the advisory business itself will change in the coming decades as medical advances materially increase the typical client's life expectancy.

So whether you're interested in learning about how Ric structures advisor compensation to encourage great client service, where advisors add the most value (and why they're typically unaware of it), or what Ric sees as the biggest changes for the planning profession in the coming years, then we hope that you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

#FASuccess Ep 088: Learning A More Genuine Sales Conversation Approach To Better Turn Prospects Into Clients with Nancy Bleeke

September 4, 2018 07:07 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 88th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast!

This week's guest is Nancy Bleeke. Nancy is the founder of Sales Pro Insider, a sales training platform for financial advisors that teaches how to better turn prospects into actual clients.

What's unique about Nancy, though, is her somewhat non-traditional sales training approach, which isn't about pushing features and benefits and going for the hard close, but simply about having a structure to the conversation that occurs in an approach talk with the prospect to ultimately help them make a decision or take an action at the end. Because the reality is, even if you're in the business to get paid for your advice and not to sell your company's products, you still have to sell someone on the reason why they should hire you and pay your fee in the first place.

In this episode, we talk in depth about Nancy's WIIFT structure to the sales conversation, which is both focusing on the "what's in it for them" of the WIIFT acronym, but also a five-step conversation process of wait and prepare, initiate, investigate, facilitate, then consolidate. The importance of asking more questions to really understand a prospect's context so that you can refine and right-size the information that you give them, and the dangers of giving prospects more information than they actually need in a manner that can just put them into analysis paralysis instead of helping to motivate them to take an action or make a decision.

We also talk about the actual key questions to ask a prospect throughout the meeting process. From setting an agenda with them in advance of every meeting to ensure you're really discussing what they want to discuss, asking what it is that brought them to the meeting to begin understanding what their real problems, opportunities, wants, and needs are, asking prospects for feedback about how your services and proposal sound to them as you describe it to them, and being certain at the end of a meeting to actually ask for their business and making it crystal clear what the next step would be in order for them to proceed.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Nancy explains why the biggest and most common problem that financial advisors make in trying to get new clients is our tendency to try to convince clients that they need a financial plan in the first place, instead of listening to what they actually want and need and relating the benefits of financial planning to their problems and concerns.

So whether you're interested in learning about building a more effective framework around your conversations with clients, how to demonstrate your expertise in a way that builds trust, or how to structure meetings to increase conversion rates, then we hope that you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

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#FASuccess Ep 097: Transitioning From Financial Coach to Financial Planner Serving Underserved Communities With Phuong Luong

#FASuccess Ep 096: The 7 Pillars Of Running An Advisory Firm Like A Real Business With Stephanie Bogan

#FASuccess Ep 095: The Never-Ending Process Of Iteratively Building An Advisory Firm with Linda Lubitz Boone

#FASuccess Ep 094: Crafting Your Optimal Solo Practice By Simply Charging What You’re Worth With James Osborne

#FASuccess Ep 093: Building A High-Income Lifestyle Practice Efficiently By Running It Like A Real Business with Sunit Bhalla

#FASuccess Ep 092: Taking More Vacation Time By Standardizing Workflows And Processes In Your Advisor CRM with Jennifer Goldman

#FASuccess Ep 091: Increasing The Value Of Advice By Focusing On Life-Centered Planning For Transitions Not Goals with Mitch Anthony

#FASuccess Ep 090: Scaling An Advisory Firm Beyond Yourself By Systematizing The Soft Skills With Julie Murphy

#FASuccess Ep 089: The Truth About Advisor Marketing And The Scalable Delivery Of Financial Advice with Ric Edelman

#FASuccess Ep 088: Learning A More Genuine Sales Conversation Approach To Better Turn Prospects Into Clients with Nancy Bleeke

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