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Welcome back to the 178th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Daniel Zajac. Daniel is a financial advisor and partner with Simone Zajac, a hybrid advisory firm on the Lincoln Investment platform that oversees nearly $250 million of assets under management for nearly 300 clients. What's unique about Daniel, though, is the way he's driven an evolution of how the advisory firm markets itself, from the traditional approach of networking with local centers of influence and relying on existing client referrals, to developing a blog for those earning significant equity compensation from their employers that has turned into one to three new digital prospects for the firm every week, many of whom are bringing seven-figure accounts to the firm, even in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Daniel built and developed a niche in working with those who receive significant equity compensation, including the years it took early on for Daniel to gain any traction with his blogging efforts, how pivoting to focus more narrowly on equity compensation accelerated his positive results, how Daniel selected equity compensation as his emerging niche in the first place, what Daniel focused on in the early years to figure out if he was on track when there were not a lot of new clients coming through yet, and how even today, Daniel has found that when blogging and marketing is focused on a niche, website traffic of just a few hundred visitors a day or a few thousand per month is sufficient to drive material new business results.
We also talk about how Daniel's advisory firm prices and delivers its planning services to clients, the digital meet-and-greet session they start with every prospect to determine if they're the right fit, the way the firm uses Dropbox in the data-gathering process to make it easy for prospective clients to share information, why the firm also offers tax preparation to clients as a part of its services, and how forming a niche has opened up new opportunities for lucrative hourly planning in addition to their traditional AUM business.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Daniel shares his perspective on why it's so important to focus sooner rather than later, having struggled himself to find his own traction after his first five years as an advisor, how the path to specialization is really more about iterating incrementally deeper and deeper and not just trying to pick the perfect future niche, and the importance of recognizing that even if you commit to an initial direction, you can always pivot to another niche focus if you're not happy with the results.