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Optimizing Your Advisory Firm Website’s Process Page For Prospect Conversion

November 20, 2023 07:05 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

As marketing and prospecting processes become increasingly digital for financial advisors, many prospective clients learn about advisors and what they offer not from an introductory call, webinar, or speaking event but from the advisor's website itself. Talking about money is often highly personal and can leave individuals feeling vulnerable, so choosing who to serve in such a high-trust role as a financial advisor can have immense stakes. Which is why it's crucial for websites to give prospects the ability to see themselves as clients, and to understand what beginning and maintaining an advisor-client relationship might look like. These steps can make a measurable difference in 'demystifying' an otherwise obscure process for a first-time prospect and help them move into action.

In this guest post, Mikel Bruce, CEO of TinyFrog Technologies, discusses building a prospect-focused Process page into an advisory firm's website as a crucial part of the sales funnel to get calls from prospective clients by clarifying the process, demonstrating an advisor's unique value proposition, and providing an easy way for prospects to 'raise their hand' when they're ready to act.

As a starting point, a well-built Process page performs 4 critical functions. First, it establishes expectations for the prospect around the process of becoming a client (including the type of calls involved, the onboarding steps, and how long it takes) and the general communication style of the firm. Importantly, keeping this overview simple, high-level, and prospect-focused is crucial. Second, a Process page should use language that helps prospects identify with and envision themselves as ideal clients of the firm. Third, the Process page should describe the specific (and likely niched) issues the firm addresses with its clients. Fourth, the Process page clearly shows how interested prospects can move forward in scheduling a consultation (or however a firm would like to meet with them) by offering easily accessible call-to-action tools (e.g., calendar and scheduling software tools built directly into the Process page). Process pages can also include a simple FAQ section to address questions about fees, working style, or the frequency of meetings that ongoing clients can expect.

Once advisors have created their Process page, they have a few ways to start optimizing it. First, they can build funnels that direct traffic to the Process page from different places on the website, with multiple user paths depending on the type of prospect and their pain points. Advisors may also want to A/B test various aspects of their pages – calls to action, for example, or different language – to see if one feature or another influences how many prospecting calls they get in turn.

The key point is that finding a trustworthy advisor with whom prospective clients can build a relationship is not a quick or easy process – but an advisor with an effective Process page can help prospects envision the unique value they can derive from engaging with the advisor, making it easier for them to understand the benefits of a long-term planning relationship and, ultimately, to decide to become clients!

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (November 18-19)

November 17, 2023 02:00 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 legislative efforts to prevent the enforcement of the Department of Labor's newly proposed "retirement security rule" have a cloudy future, as both Democrats and President Biden are opposing such efforts. Which suggests that, if enacted, the ultimate fate of the proposed regulation, like its similar predecessors, will likely be decided in the courts.

Also in industry news this week:

CFP Board has expanded the details it provides regarding disciplinary actions, expanding transparency around the disciplinary process for both CFP professionals and the broader public
A recent study suggests that advisory firms that hire specialists are able to offer more planning services and increase the amount of time advisors spend with clients, though doing so comes at a cost

From there, we have several articles on retirement planning:

Why higher interest rates and lower inflation have led to an increased initial safe withdrawal rate for retirees, according to one analysis
A group of retirement 'supernerds' critiques a recent claim that retirees can confidently use an 8% safe withdrawal rate
Why retirees might consider gifting while they are alive rather than waiting until their deaths to leave money to loved ones and charities

We also have a number of articles on tax planning:

How financial advisors can add value for clients by helping them make Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs) correctly
The range of tax-savings opportunities advisors can uncover when reviewing a client's tax return
A year-end tax planning checklist advisors and clients can use to ensure there will be no surprises when it comes time to file their 2023 tax returns

We wrap up with 3 final articles, all about managing wealth:

Why having significant wealth does not immunize an individual from worrying about money
How advisors can support clients who are entering a relationship with unequal wealth
Budgeting and account management tools consumers (and their advisors) can consider using following the upcoming shutdown of Mint

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

Kitces & Carl Ep 125: Scale Your Business, Leverage Yourself, Or Just Grow

November 16, 2023 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast

Kitces & Carl Ep Scale Your Business Leverage Yourself Or Just Grow

For many financial advisory firms that start out as solo shops, a single advisor-owner is often responsible for managing all aspects of running their practice, from handling all aspects of client service to prospecting for new clients. But as a firm's client base grows, the owner might find that they need to bring on employees to help manage the expanding workload. However, while it might be easy for business owners in this position to recognize that their firms are growing in terms of client revenue or other metrics, it can be harder for them to determine whether they are truly 'scaling' their business, as scaling involves a greater investment in both time and money to manage the firm's growth and pay a rising number of employees.

In our 125th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss what it actually means to scale an advisory business, why doing so necessarily requires more staff support, and how scaling a firm is different than merely finding ways to best leverage a firm owner's time.

As a starting point, it's important to recognize the difference between "growth" and "scaling" for a financial advisory firm. Growth in a firm implies an increase in revenue and/or profits accompanied by a proportional rise in the number of employees and other costs. For example, a firm might quadruple its revenue while also quadrupling the number of advisors and support staff it hires (and still have a growth in profits!). By contrast, scaling indicates that the firm is increasing its revenue at a faster pace than it hires, often by generating efficiencies. For example, a scaling firm might quadruple its revenue while only tripling its headcount, potentially leading to even greater profitability.

Notably, though, the effectiveness of a firm's scaling efforts isn't just about whether it needs to hire staff, but rather about how many new hires are needed to serve a growing client base. Because, unlike software companies where each additional unit sold requires little additional labor, financial advisory firms inherently require advisors and staff to maintain a certain level of human-to-human interaction and to develop and implement financial plans for their clients.

Ultimately, the key point is that while many advisors have successfully scaled their businesses, doing so requires a firm owner to hire additional employees and does not merely involve finding ways to better leverage their own time. Which suggests that advisors looking to grow their revenue without working more hours themselves face a choice: remain as a solo practice or small team but try to move 'upmarket' to serve a similar number of clients who are willing and able to pay a higher fee, or scale by growing the firm's client base (and employee headcount) as efficiently as possible!

Employee Retention Credit: Helping Clients By Assessing Rules And Eligibility In 4 Phases

November 15, 2023 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Taxes

In the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, many small businesses such as restaurants, entertainment venues, and retail stores experienced cratering revenues, either due to government lockdown orders that forced many non-essential businesses to temporarily shut their doors, or simply due to lack of demand since many of their customers decided to stay at home out of an abundance of caution. To stave off a wave of business closures and a subsequent surge in unemployment, the U.S. government designed a number of small business relief packages to incentivize companies to keep workers on their payrolls. One of these was the Employee Retention Credit (ERC), a tax credit that eligible small businesses could take against their employment taxes.

Although it was initially overshadowed by other relief measures such as the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), more recently, the ERC – which technically ended after 2021, but which businesses have until as late as April 15, 2025, to claim – has attracted attention due to a pop-up industry of ERC vendors who purport to help small businesses claim the credit. The caveat is that many of these vendors encouraged businesses to apply for the ERC even when they weren't eligible, and the resulting wave of questionable ERC applications has caused the IRS to scrutinize businesses' claims of eligibility for the credit. As a result of this attention, advisors are seeing an uptick in questions from their clients – and may have questions about their own businesses – regarding whether or not the ERC is really legitimate, who can actually claim it, and whether it's worth pursuing either way.

While the ERC is indeed legitimate, determining eligibility is complex largely due to its phased implementation across 4 separate 'phases' spanning most of 2020 and all of 2021. Each phase has slightly different rules about who can claim the ERC and how the credit is calculated. Businesses need to determine their eligibility for the ERC and the amount that they can claim on a quarterly basis, adhering to the specific rules of the 'phase' in which each quarter falls since these rules can shift from one quarter to the next!

In general, businesses can apply for the ERC if they were forced to partially or fully suspend their operations due to a government order, or if they experienced a "significant decline in gross receipts" between March 13, 2020, and September 30, 2021. A business could also qualify as a "recovery startup business" (as long as the business started after February 15, 2020, had annual gross receipts of under $1 million, and didn't otherwise qualify under the other criteria), which would allow it to claim the credit for the last 2 quarters of 2021. The credit itself is calculated as a percentage of the "qualified wages" paid to employees. Notably, many of the criteria used to determine the credit – including what constitutes a "significant decline in gross receipts", what is included in "qualified wages", and what percentage of qualified wages is used to calculate the credit – vary for different time periods, as well as for different sized businesses.

The key point is that, unlike the claims of many ERC vendors, determining a business's eligibility for the ERC is by no means a simple process and generally requires the expertise of a tax professional. And yet, many ERC vendors are not tax professionals themselves, often shifting the liability of complying with the complex eligibility requirements onto the business (even while the ERC vendor collects a substantial portion of the business's ERC as fees for itself). Financial advisors, then, can help by serving as an advocate for business owner clients, helping them preliminarily determine whether they may or may not qualify for the ERC and directing them to an expert tax professional to help them make the final decision of whether or not to claim it. Which has value even if the client isn't ultimately eligible, since the headache of applying for the ERC and being later found ineligible by the IRS could be far worse than not applying for the ERC in the first place!

#FA Success Ep 359: Building A Financial Planning Assessment To Show Clients Progress And Value Over Time, With Eric Miller

November 14, 2023 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 359th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Eric Miller. Eric is the Chief Financial Advisor and Co-Owner of Econologics Financial Advisors, an independent RIA based in Largo, Florida, that generates more than $4M of revenue while working with nearly 300 client households.

What's unique about Eric, though, is how he leverages a custom-built financial planning assessment he calls their Financial Prosperity Index, which he gives to both prospective and ongoing current clients so that they can better understand their financial health, target the financial planning domains where clients need the most help, and even more importantly be able to track their progress over time and demonstrate the value of their ongoing financial planning relationship without needing to just talk about the numbers of net worth and investment performance.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about why Eric intentionally built his Financial Prosperity Index to cover 100 different questions where the client is scored across 9 different domains and then receives an aggregate weighted score and a letter grade (with identified areas of improvement to lift their grade higher), why Eric has found that even prospective clients will take the whole 100 question assessment before their first meeting because ultimately they want to see their score and get feedback on how they're doing, and why, because Eric niche-focused his practice on health care practice owners (and even more specifically with physical therapists, veterinarians, dentists, and optometrists), he has been able to develop additional even-more-refined assessments geared to their specific business needs to further demonstrate the value of their advice beyond 'just' the portfolio.

We also talk about why Eric chose to niche focus his practice because he saw firsthand from his family members who work in health care that those in the industry were being underserved and he felt that he could provide a meaningful difference in their financial lives, how Eric grew his practice by developing relationships with business consultants to medical professionals and offering the consultants a 3-day in-person financial education course they could offer to their business clients (allowing Eric to get in front of his ideal prospects while also creating a benefit for the consultants who were allowed to charge for the program that Eric delivered), and how, because Eric charges up to $6,500 for an upfront financial planning fee and a $475 monthly subscription fee to work with his clients ongoing, his firm is on track to generate over $4 million in revenue this year with barely 1/4th of his revenue coming from traditional AUM fees.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Eric shares why, even though his firm added 60 new clients last year, Eric has his sights on acquiring at least 100 new clients per year going forward so that he can grow and scale his firm even faster because he wants to help even more people, how Eric historically struggled to celebrate his wins because he was constantly focusing on the next goal but has grown to appreciate the almost-therapeutic benefits of taking a moment to appreciate the accomplishments and progress that have already been made, and why Eric believes that younger, newer advisors should focus on not just on the technical skills but on developing their communications skills and becoming more self-aware of how they communicate with clients (because good communication skills lead to better client engagement, which is what ultimately drives a more successful career as a financial advisor).

So, whether you're interested in learning about how Eric chose the 100 questions to include in his Financial Prosperity Index, how Eric now focuses on speaking at conferences geared toward practice owners (sometimes paying thousands of dollars to do so) to more directly talk with prospective clients and demonstrate his service offerings, or how Eric wrote a book specifically for practice owners that he gives away in exchange for a prospective client's card so that they can later set up a meeting to talk, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Eric Miller.

Optimizing Virtual Client Meetings To Make Them More ‘Real’ And Less Exhausting

November 13, 2023 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

Traditionally, financial planning meetings have been held face-to-face in an advisor's office, and over the years, a body of research has emerged showing that how the advisor's office is laid out can have a significant impact on how clients perceive the advisor, their mood during the meeting, and even their resulting financial planning decisions. However, over the last decade (and particularly since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic), many advisors have increasingly been holding virtual client meetings over Zoom or other videoconferencing software – and more recent evidence is showing that, just as the physical office environment matters for advisors who meet in person, the 'virtual' office environment also matters for those who meet virtually.

In this post, Kitces Senior Financial Planning Nerd Ben Henry-Moreland writes about the unique challenges created by virtual meetings and how advisors can optimize their meeting space (as well as the structure of the meetings themselves) as a virtual environment.

For many advisors, the transition to meeting virtually was a struggle on account of two major challenges. First, communicating effectively and creating the same level of personal connection over a video call is more difficult than when meeting in person; in other words, there is a decline in what researchers call 'social presence' or the feeling of being present with a real person. Second, many people (not just advisors) who have greatly increased their use of virtual meetings in the last few years have experienced the phenomenon of 'Zoom fatigue', in which a combination of factors (including excessive eye contact, the distraction of viewing one's self onscreen, limited mobility, and louder speaking) make virtual meetings far more tiring than those held in person.

However, advisors can significantly reduce these negative effects of meeting virtually by optimizing the setup of their office environment and meeting structure. For example, the way that an advisor sets up their lighting, sound, and office furniture for their virtual meeting can affect how 'immersive' and realistic it feels for the client on the other end of the call. Furthermore, setting up a meeting background (either in the form of a physical office space or a computer-generated backdrop) that's more inviting than imposing can help the client feel more relaxed and open in conversation, while introducing opportunities to go 'off-screen' during the meeting (such as using screen sharing options at various points or even just building occasional breaks into the agenda) can help both the client and advisor fight Zoom fatigue and stay focused.

The key point is that with just a small investment – both in monetary terms for lighting, sound, and camera equipment, and in time spent planning how to set up the office space and structure the meeting – advisors can meaningfully improve the virtual meeting experience for both their clients and themselves, and create an environment more conducive to talking about the client's issues and feelings around money. Ultimately, that investment can make the transition to meetings well worth it, since the ability to meet with clients virtually means that advisors can work with more types of clients, specialize in new niches, and thrive in new ways without the geographic constraints of meeting in person.