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#FA Success Ep 277: Crafting A More Unique Value Proposition By Investing Into A More Focused Clientele, With Lauren Oschman

April 19, 2022 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Lauren Oschman Podcast Featured Image FAS

Welcome back to the 277th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Lauren Oschman. Lauren is the CEO of Vestia Personal Wealth Advisors, an independent RIA based in Nashville, Tennessee, that oversees $600 million in assets for nearly 500 client households.

What's unique about Lauren, though, is how she and her firm not only serve a unique niche of physicians, but have also built practice groups within the firm that serve niches within the niche, including female physicians and orthopedic surgeons, and have developed hyper-specialized services for their unique clientele that allow them to truly differentiate.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Lauren and her partners built a firm dedicated to providing a high-touch, customizable client experience that still fits into the busy lifestyles of physicians, how Lauren’s firm developed services that help their physician clients with the unique challenges they face when it comes salary contract negotiations, and mortgages and disability insurance for doctors with highly variability income, and the way Lauren’s firm has further specialized in student loans and helping physicians understand when they may qualify for potentially six-figure Public Student Loan Forgiveness for their non-profit hospital work.

We also talk about how starting her career at a male-dominated advisory firm gave Lauren a better understanding of the importance of inclusivity and diversity for women advisors, how Lauren, immediately after having her first daughter, took a risk to leave the firm she outgrew and launch her own in order to pursue better leadership and ownership opportunities where she could have a much greater impact on change, and why Lauren believes learning to communicate and working on human connection as a financial advisor are equally as important as learning the technical skills in how to build a financial plan.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Lauren shares how she views the adversity she experienced in her career as learning opportunities and uses those moments as inspiration for her own future and for future generations in her firm, how building a team within her firm has helped Lauren feel more fulfilled by having more people around her that she can uplift and impact the lives of, and how, while Lauren is still striving to further improve the workplace that she has created, it’s looking back on how far you’ve come and how much you’ve achieved that really reflects the impact you’ve had on the world.

So whether you’re interested in learning about how Lauren integrates her “made for you” philosophy into her branding and marketing, how she simplified her fee structure to create scalability in problem-solving, and how Lauren fosters community and work/life balance with high demands on both sides, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Lauren Oschman.

Measuring The ‘Best’ Marketing Strategies And The Second Kitces Research Study On Advisor Marketing

April 18, 2022 07:07 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Nerd's Eye View

One of the largest hurdles for many financial advisors is not in developing the technical skills to be able to give good advice to clients, but in learning how to engage effective marketing strategies that are essential to growing and sustaining a successful advisory firm. Unfortunately, this struggle to attract a critical mass of prospective clients to actually pay for an advisor’s services has resulted in a very high attrition rate in the advisory industry (as high as 70% in the first three years). Accordingly, there has been a great deal of attention on identifying the ‘best’ marketing strategies for financial advisors to help them grow their businesses.

However, there have been surprisingly few studies exploring effective marketing practices in the financial advisor industry over the past years. Which is why we launched the first Kitces Research Survey on Advisor Marketing in 2019, to identify the marketing strategies financial advisors are really using that work (or not), what tools, technology, and systems advisors use, best practices in the most popular advisor marketing techniques, and what advisory firms really spend on marketing (including hard-dollar marketing costs, tools and technology, and staff support). Our study revealed that, while some of the most popular marketing strategies actually being used by advisors were those that required a large investment of time (such as establishing relationships with COIs, social media, and other forms of networking), many of these popular time-based marketing strategies turned out to be among the least effective at using the firm’s resources (i.e., time and money) to generate new clients. Conversely, strategies with comparatively modest investments of time and dollars (like SEO strategies and paid web listings) were far less common among the advisors surveyed in the study, yet ended out having the lowest Client Acquisition Costs!

Accordingly, pursuing more resource-intensive marketing channels – that potentially involve both time and money – can be a worthwhile effort in helping advisors attract more clients (for instance, cultivating relationships with COIs with affluent client bases, which potentially requires many hours of an advisor’s time, could yield more high-net-worth prospects than less resource-intensive marketing strategies) by generating enough new revenue that makes the time invested worth the effort, even if they may seem less ‘efficient’ in terms of the acquisition cost per client than those requiring fewer resources. These considerations become increasingly important as an advisory firm grows in terms of clients and revenue, because the larger a firm grows, the more difficult it is to scale time-intensive marketing channels (like COIs and networking) with that growth, since the advisor’s time gets both more valuable and more scarce. Ultimately, investing into more efficient – and scalable – marketing strategies can be a key component of sustainably growing an advisory firm as it becomes easier to spend the resources on dollar-based strategies than on time-based strategies.

To dive deeper into the costs and efficiency of various marketing strategies, we are excited to announce the 2022 Kitces Research Study on Advisor Marketing, which will examine how advisors’ marketing strategies have evolved over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and explore further what the fastest-growing advisory firms are doing to market themselves at scale. All advisors are invited to participate and help the advisor community better understand “What Actually Works In Advisor Marketing”– and hopefully gain some insight into how they can improve their own marketing efforts as well!

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (Apr 16-17)

April 15, 2022 02:03 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” - this week’s edition kicks off with the news that Vanguard is partnering with American Express to offer its Personal Advisor Services human CFP offering to AmEx cardholders, giving Vanguard access to a significant new base of potential clients (and combining low investment minimums with credit card perks to entice clients to hire Vanguard as their first – and perhaps only – financial advisor).

Also in industry news this week:

The SEC has issued guidance discouraging RIAs from using the term “fiduciary” to describe their standards of conduct on Form CRS, irking fiduciary advocates who believe RIAs should be allowed to highlight the differences between the standards that apply to them and those that apply to broker-dealers
The growth in RIA valuations may soon slow or even begin to decline, as Canadian financial conglomerate CI Financial is selling off 20% of its U.S. wealth management business in an initial public offering, which could raise newfound scrutiny of the prices they’ve been offering for RIA acquisitions and slow their demand.

From there, we have several articles on investments:

How I Bonds’ new interest rate will make them even more valuable for advisors and their clients in a world of high inflation
Why the rising interest rate environment is bringing a newfound focus on cash management for clients (from money market mutual funds to shopping banks for yield)
While bonds are often seen as a diversifier for equities in client portfolios, Treasuries have performed this function better than other types of bonds in recent years

We also have a number of articles on how advisors can communicate their value to prospective clients:

Why positioning financial advice as expert coaching to achieve a higher level of success – as a good athlete can use a good coach to reach an elite level – can help prospective clients better visualize the value of financial advice
Why justifying an advisor’s fees requires first understanding what a prospective client actually values in the first place, so the advisor can describe what they can do for the prospect in terms of what really matters to them
How advisors can create a brief and compelling value proposition that is consistent across multiple marketing channels (and can be expanded upon in conversations with prospects)

We wrap up with three final articles, all about email management techniques:

While instant messaging tools are often superior to email in the workplace, email can be a useful tool for personal correspondence and checking in with clients
How advisors can reduce the stress of dealing with emails that require complicated responses
Several methods advisors can use to spend less time dealing with email each day

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

Simplifying Retirement Income Planning Visualization Using The ‘Spending Risk Curve’

April 13, 2022 07:03 am 7 Comments CATEGORY: Retirement Planning

Retirement income planning is often one of the primary reasons prospective clients approach a financial advisor. In a world of increasing longevity and declining reliance on defined benefit retirement plans, being able to give clients an estimate of how much they can ‘safely’ spend each year, given their available assets, is a major part of an advisor’s value proposition. To do so, advisors often rely on Monte Carlo analyses, which provide the probability of a particular course of action being ‘successful’ (and, therefore, implying the corresponding probability of ‘failure’). However, the typical presentation of Monte Carlo results via a single probability-of-success outcome can make for a cumbersome process of guessing and checking plan results to get a sense of the range of plan outcomes for a client across different levels of spending.

A potential solution to ameliorate this problem and allow for easy comparison across various spending levels is to leverage technology to graphically display curves that relate a client’s spending levels with corresponding risk outcomes. These “Spending Risk Curves” can be far more insightful than a single probability-of-success result, and very useful for an advisor to gain a higher-level understanding of a client’s financial options by visually illustrating the trade-offs between a client’s spending choices and risk in retirement.

At their core, Spending Risk Curves show the trade-off between risk (framed in terms of probability of success or otherwise) and spending in retirement planning (i.e., as annual portfolio withdrawals increase, so does the spending risk level) based on a client’s particular circumstances (e.g., mixes of ages, longevity expectations, or Social Security benefits). In this way, Spending Risk Curves give advisors an idea not only of the full range of options for the initial risk/income levels, but, when combined with Spending Risk Curves at different portfolio levels, can also of the future adjustments to spending that might be needed (these could be to the upside or the downside, depending on portfolio performance) to keep the client at the desired risk level.

Ultimately, the key point is that Spending Risk Curves are highly versatile tools that can help advisors better conceptualize the range of outcomes associated with different spending levels for their clients, so that they can more easily design relevant and suitable financial plans. By understanding the full range of spending options at all levels of risk for a given client’s situation and being able to estimate future spending adjustments that might be needed to maintain a desired level of risk, advisors can not only give clients a more accurate view of their choices but also communicate what changes to spending might be needed down the line to keep their plan on track. In the end, this can lead clients not only to make better-informed decisions but also to have more confidence in their financial plan!

#FA Success Ep 276: Integrating Tax And Legal Services Under One Roof To Truly Scale A ‘One-Stop Shop’, With John Hagensen

April 12, 2022 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

John Hagensen Podcast Featured Image FAS

Welcome back to the 276th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is John Hagensen. John is the founder of Keystone Wealth Partners, an independent RIA with offices in Arizona and North Dakota, that oversees $650 million of assets under management for nearly 1000 client households.

What's unique about John, though, is how he is one of the first non-lawyer financial advisors in the nation to build, own, and operate a law firm, which he then leverages, along with his own tax firm, to create a truly one-stop-shop wealth management experience of financial planning, tax, and estate, for his mass affluent clients.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how the unrealized predictions of fee compression in the financial industry inspired John to concentrate on adding more measurable value for his clients with tax and estate services, how John has been able to leverage his all-in-one service offering to gain a faster pace of referrals, and how John has been able to grow to nearly 1,000 clients in barely more than a decade through a multi-prong education-based marketing strategy that utilizes informational webinars, in-person events, and making a big investment into a weekly radio show.

We also talk about how John transitioned from a career as an airline pilot but still incorporates the same systematized checklist-oriented mindset to build standard processes for his own businesses, how he has become comfortable with the idea of not being a right fit as an advisor for every prospective client, and how he found a sense of renewal after a trip to Ethiopia made him look internally and evaluate his purpose in life and the potential impact of his money.

And be certain to listen to the end, where John shares how the growth of his business led to a mindset shift to focus more on the collective team after realizing how dependent he had become on hiring the right people, how he believes in utilizing the talents and resources afforded to us to help uplift others rather than just himself, and how his plans for the future are centered on a potential merger to scale up even further to expand his all-in-one services across the country.

So whether you’re interested in learning about how John created a true one-stop-shop experience for his clients, how he uses slower, ‘older’ marketing techniques to attract prospects, or how he measures the success of new ventures and avenues explored, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with John Hagensen.

FPA Defines Its New Roadmap: Serving CFP Professionals And Building (Trust With) Local Chapters

April 11, 2022 07:08 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Planning Profession

Leading up to the arrival of new CEO Patrick Mahoney in 2020, the Financial Planning Association (FPA) had experienced a rocky few years. From the continued decline in membership (including a 25% cut between 2018 and 2020) to the angry backlash among members regarding the OneFPA initiative (not to mention challenges brought on by the COVID pandemic), the FPA was in need of a fresh start. With this background in mind, Mahoney has taken several steps since his arrival to revive the FPA’s relationship with its chapters and members and could help the organization grow for the first time in years.

Mahoney’s efforts started with trade and national press outreach efforts, offering interviews to tell the FPA’s story and to communicate the value of the organization – and, more generally, financial planning – to the broader public, emphasizing the efforts made by FPA chapters to drive professionalism among their ranks. Mahoney then focused on rebuilding trust between local FPA chapters and the national FPA headquarters by meeting with FPA chapter boards across the country and reinforcing that the main goal of the FPA home office is to support its members and the profession (in stark contrast to the FPA’s previous message that its members existed to support the FPA). This shift in attitude prompted changes to the FPA staffing structure intended to better serve its chapters and members, and gave rise to a new Chief Membership Experience Officer position, as well as a new membership experience department and chapter experience team whose roles are to help chapters better serve FPA members on their level.

Perhaps most importantly, the new FPA Advisory Council (that originally arose from the initial OneFPA initiative) has brought the leaders of 80 FPA chapters together with Mahoney and key board members, who have been actively brainstorming ways to reverse the organization’s membership decline and put the FPA on what would be its first growth path since its inception. As a result of the Advisory Council’s recommendation to identify the organization’s core members, the FPA has determined that the FPA’s marketing and membership benefits will be oriented to making the lives of CFP practitioners – the organization’s formally defined ‘core member’ – easier and more convenient.

Ultimately, the key point is that while the FPA’s turnaround is going to take time, the first steps have been taken. By focusing on CFP professionals as its core members and restructuring the organization to focus on how it can serve its chapters and members (rather than on the support of members required to sustain the organization), the FPA and its leadership have built a foundation for the organization to grow and thrive in the years ahead!

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Kitces Webinar

End-of-Year And 2025 Tax Planning

Presented by Jeff Levine, CPA/PFS, CFP®, CWS®, AIF®, MSA, Lead Financial Planning Nerd for Kitces.com & Chief Planning Officer at Buckingham Wealth Partners

#FA Success Ep 277: Crafting A More Unique Value Proposition By Investing Into A More Focused Clientele, With Lauren Oschman

Measuring The ‘Best’ Marketing Strategies And The Second Kitces Research Study On Advisor Marketing

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (Apr 16-17)

Want CE Credit for reading articles like this?

Simplifying Retirement Income Planning Visualization Using The ‘Spending Risk Curve’

#FA Success Ep 276: Integrating Tax And Legal Services Under One Roof To Truly Scale A ‘One-Stop Shop’, With John Hagensen

FPA Defines Its New Roadmap: Serving CFP Professionals And Building (Trust With) Local Chapters

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Kitces Webinar

End-of-Year And 2025 Tax Planning

Presented by Jeff Levine, CPA/PFS, CFP®, CWS®, AIF®, MSA, Lead Financial Planning Nerd for Kitces.com & Chief Planning Officer at Buckingham Wealth Partners

Want CE Credit for reading articles like this?

Nerd’s Eye View Praise

Showcase YOUR Expertise

Stay In Touch

Questions?

Presented by Jeff Levine, CPA/PFS, CFP®, CWS®, AIF®, MSA, Lead Financial Planning Nerd for Kitces.com & Chief Planning Officer at Buckingham Wealth Partners  