Welcome back to the 377th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Meredith Moore. Meredith is the Founder & CEO of Artisan Financial Strategies, a hybrid advisory firm based in Alpharetta, Georgia, that oversees $77M in assets under management for 120 client households.
What's unique about Meredith, though, is how she was able to keep her firm open, navigating through and ultimately growing to more than $1M of annual revenue, despite a diagnosis in 2005 of a 7cm Glioblastoma tumor in her brain, resulting in several years of major surgeries, radiation treatments, and chemotherapies, all the while continuing to see and serve her clients. In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Meredith has met the multitude of challenges she has faced in the last 17 years head-on and found ways to navigate Artisan to ongoing growth despite those trying times, how Meredith decided to amplify her ability to grow the firm by hiring early (before she even had $200,000 in revenue) in the interest of staying ahead of the company's capacity (which, ultimately, jump-started a faster pace of revenue growth for her), and how, after a period of bad hires, Meredith pivoted Artisan's hiring process by leaning into LinkedIn Ads and more clearly articulating both what each role needed to succeed, and what a prospective candidate would really need to be able to do in order to move up and grow with the company in the future.
We also talk about how Meredith's realization that women who outearn their male partners are more apt to involve those partners in financial decisions than men would be, lead her to focus her advisory niche on women senior executives and entrepreneurs who are the household breadwinners, Meredith's whirlwind experience in being accepted as a speaker for TEDx Women in November, 2022, to talk about couples' dynamics with money (and the shock of having her talk cut down from 2,000 to 300 words to deliver for the event itself, and having to redo the entire talk on the day of the event), and how Meredith, inspired by Dorie Clark's "Becoming a Recognized Expert" course, has leveraged her TEDx talk as "social proof" of her expertise, and further leaned into expanding her network of potential clients through a luncheon series, each meeting connecting 6 women in high-level leadership roles who would meet and talk through a series of 3 simple questions that Meredith provided in order to connect with one another.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Meredith shares how she struggled in knowing how to really run an advisory practice like a business due to a lack of mentors around her (and is now much more mindful of the types of fellow advisor business owners she surrounds herself with), why Meredith still feels like her practice is in a "chasm of potential death" because of the unique challenges that arise in hiring and scaling up an advisory firm as it crosses $1M of revenue (and the staff infrastructure that has to be built to keep growing through that phase), and how, despite Meredith's surprise at how hard running and growing a business still is after 17 years, she's been able to keep growing by trying to constantly evolve, keep improving her process to find and put the right team members into the right roles that the business needs.
So, whether you're interested in learning about how hiring early and having the right recruitment and hiring process in place can mean the difference between the firm surviving despite a surprise brain cancer diagnosis and running out of cash due to years of bad hires, what it's REALLY like to apply, prepare for and give a TED Talk (twice), or how to grow your network and client base through intimate gatherings of influential and inspirational people within your firm's niche, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Meredith Moore.
