Download Meghaan Lurtz's, "Client Meeting Agenda Template" below, and check out "Improving Advisor Team Efficacy By Overcoming The Many Minds Problem Of Group Conversation" for more tools, tips, and strategies to overcome the challenges of Many Minds communication and help team members keep clients happy while supporting each other in the process!
Client Meeting Agenda Template
Welcome back to the 191st episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Tiffany Charles. Tiffany is the chief growth officer for Destiny Capital, a hybrid advisory firm based near Denver, Colorado that oversees $260 million in assets under management for nearly 200 households. What's unique about Tiffany, though, is the way she's crafted a unique role for herself as the chief growth officer for an independent advisory firm with a focus not simply on personally prospecting for new business, but building more scalable marketing systems to power the growth of the entire firm.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Tiffany forged her own career path through the industry. Starting out first as an executive assistant and then taking on roles in compliance and marketing before climbing the ladder from an associate advisor to a lead, the challenges in building a book of clients by the traditional industry approach that may not be authentic to one's natural style of marketing, the way Tiffany restructured her own personal focus to move away from business outcomes and towards measuring her activity instead, and how Tiffany ultimately created her own unique chief growth officer role with the focus on the firm's revenue, client experience, brand identity, and culture.
We also talk about how Tiffany took on her chief growth officer role with her firm as a tie-in to a next-generation succession plan for the firm. Why it was so appealing to join a firm that was already in the midst of transitioning to the next generation of leadership, how she negotiated her role to become a new partner with the firm, and the way she co-created a new vision with the firm and her new partner to pursue a new niche of working with entrepreneurs.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Tiffany shares the challenges in transitioning an advisory firm from a lifestyle focus to a path of growth. Why even if you have an aspirational vision of someday leading an advisory firm, often the key experiences that shape you come from those early entry-level roles that are still so valuable in the early stages of our own careers, and the power of finding a mentor and investing into a coach to help get perspective on how to navigate the key steps of your career along the way.
Welcome back to the 189th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Taylor Schulte. Taylor is the founder of Define Financial, an independent RIA based in San Diego, CA that oversees $76 million of assets under management for 60 families in or approaching retirement. What's unique about Taylor, though, is the way he's grown his practice by proactively spending on marketing, from hiring a branding and website design agency to a PR firm to running ongoing advisor marketing experiments, and everything from local SEO to email marketing automation.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about both the hits and the misses in marketing that Taylor has experienced along the way. From the initial $12,000 he invested into his original website that, in retrospect, wasn't focused enough to succeed, to the $24,000 he spent on a PR firm that was deemed valuable but not something he continued, how Taylor figured out how to turn podcast listeners into clients (but only after 3 years of trying), and the way all his marketing results accelerated once he decided to narrow to a more focused target clientele to pursue, even though it meant firing his mother and his grandfather from being clients, such that today, 75% of all of Taylor's new clients first reach out to him through his well-targeted website that speaks to his niche clientele.
We also talk about Taylor's own evolution within the business. How he hit the wall at $250,000 of revenue and got stuck, unable to grow further, not because of his marketing, but his operations limitations, the way he got through the blocking point by hiring an office manager to take over and focus on those operational aspects, the unique hiring process that Taylor used to find the ideal office manager, and the journal that Taylor now keeps to monitor what he should be doing and what he needs to start delegating.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Taylor shares how working with business coaches have helped him break through the key blocking points in his business, how he has come to rely on CRM workflows, even though Taylor in his own words is not operations-minded, and why Taylor's biggest regret is that he didn't focus on his niche clientele earlier, even as he recognizes that struggling without a niche focus for several years may have been the only way he could eventually accept why getting more focused would help the way that it has.
Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the big industry buzz that Schwab has announced it will be retaining TD Ameritrade's iRebal solution in the merger, which is both a big relief to TD Ameritrade RIAs often reliant on the tool, a big opportunity for Schwab to expand adoption of the popular tool to its own even-larger base of Schwab advisors, and a big threat to independent rebalancing software providers currently serving Schwab RIAs that may soon find themselves threatened by Schwab's offer of another 'free' solution.
Also in the news this week is the latest industry trend data from FINRA, showing a record-low number of registered representatives joining broker-dealers in 2019, as more and more financial advisors don't simply leave broker-dealers for RIAs but join RIAs rather than coming into the brokerage side of the industry in the first place (while broker-dealers try to combat the trend by increasingly expanding their own hybrid platforms for those who want to and are willing to be dually registered with FINRA and as an RIA!).
From there, we have a number of additional articles about industry trends, including a consumer survey showing that while investors increasingly want to talk to their financial advisors about a broader range of topics, "investments" are still the dominant category for advice; highlights of the latest FA Insight practice management study showing that advisory firms still grew well in 2019 but organic growth continues to slow while operational overhead costs are on the rise; a mid-year "snapshot" study from Ensemble Practice noting that at least larger advisory firms have weathered the pandemic well with the median firm's revenue down barely 1% and only 4% of firms engaging in layoffs but a whopping 48% of advisory firms seeing at least one employee resign as the pandemic disrupts normal working (and parenting) habits; and a study finding that individual financial advisors shined over 'call center' advisors when it came to making personal connections that maintained client satisfaction in the midst of the pandemic.
We also have several articles on marketing, including why advisor marketing should be viewed as less of a magic formula to spot and more of an ongoing series of experiments to test and improve upon (with some ideas on where to start), tips from Influence expert Robert Cialdini on how to engage and be persuasive with prospects (especially when meeting with them virtually), and a look at how to create an advisory firm that is distinct for having a clear mission and a team that passionately believes in that mission.
We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of thinking hard about what "success" really means: the first explores how the traditional measure of wealth (accumulated assets) is a poor way to measure because success at wealth-building is really about the wealth you build relative to your income; the second also explores how we often use the wrong "proxy" to measure success; and the third takes an even deeper look at what it really means to be "successful" and what we should be considering when we try to measure the value of our own lives and what we've accomplished.
Enjoy the 'light' reading!
Over the past several years, financial advisors have increasingly utilized digital channels as a part of their overall marketing strategies, as the more traditional tactics for generating new leads have become less effective (and especially in recent months amid the ongoing COVID pandemic). Of course, a key ingredient of digital marketing is content (whether it be a book, podcast, blog, video, or any number of content ‘artifacts’). For many financial advisors, however, content creation isn’t something that comes as naturally as, say, comparing decumulation strategies or analyzing Monte Carlo simulations, and it’s easy to hit a roadblock when staring at a blank screen.
In our 39th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards share some actionable steps that advisors can take to create content for digital marketing that can then be used to establish the advisor’s expertise with their existing (or prospective clients). Because the reality is that there are far more tools available for creating all sorts of content in a myriad of formats and packaging beyond simply typing out words one paragraph at a time into a long-form article.
As a starting point, it’s helpful to actively observe internal sticking points that may slow down the advisor’s capacity to create content, and then consciously turn them into ‘features’ instead. For instance, don’t have the capacity or desire to deal with the logistics of booking guests to have on a podcast? Decide instead to produce a short podcast without guests where the primary feature is the listener’s opportunity to hear from the advisor directly. Use the memo feature on your phone to remember stuff or take notes as someone who doesn’t like to write? Upload them to SoundCloud, and share them on social media or with a client newsletter as an audio recording that clients and prospects can listen to without needing to read it!
Another tried and true method for effective content creation is to simply keep track of the questions that clients already ask, and turning the answers into something (appropriately anonymized for the particulars of the situation) to share out with the broader base of clients and prospects. And (importantly) it doesn’t have to start as something that is written down. Instead, it can start as a spoken response, that is then transcribed and edited using any number of tools, or even produced as a podcast... or both! In fact, there are several services where freelance creatives are available to take raw content (the advisor’s expertise answering common client questions) and turn it into polished material, that can then be repurposed and distributed on different platforms.
Because the simple fact is that, for advisors who have decided that they have expertise that they feel would help a broader audience or a perspective on an issue that they want to share, there are a few relatively simple steps to take – track notable ideas and observations, block out just a little time each week to review those notes, record observations, and send that basic commentary along to a freelancer – to start regularly creating content. Because, after all, while many advisors get writer’s block, few get talker’s block!
In the early days of the financial advice industry, an advisor’s career track was relatively straightforward. Either they met their insurance policy or investment product sales quota to qualify their contract, or they found some other way to make a living. However, amid the ongoing shift towards the recurring revenue AUM model, and the concomitant rising need for ongoing client advice and servicing, various new roles within firms began to emerge, including client service associates, paraplanners, and (not-responsible-for-business-development) lead advisors.
Along the way, advisory firms generally followed a traditional “performance review” model for determining why and when this new crop of employee advisor roles would progress (or not) on to the next level. Yet in practice, most of corporate America has shifted away from this traditional performance review approach, and towards leadership-based programs to develop and retain talent… while many advisory firms remain mired in the now-outdated management-heavy performance model.
In this guest post, Angie Herbers – Chief Executive and Senior Consultant at Herbers & Company, an independent management and growth consultancy for financial advisory firms – explains why advisory firms still favor the performance model (they’re in the advice business after all, and tend to tell employees what they should be doing instead of providing training, development, and leadership), and how those firms can instead create a stronger culture and ensure that employees are collectively striving towards the same end-goal with a different approach to employee management.
The key distinction is that there is a fine line between telling an employee what they should be doing (and how), and influencing them to go in a direction that helps advance everyone involved. And a first step towards aligning expectations with a more influencing-oriented approach is by developing well-defined career tracks that show (rather than tell) firm employees the path that’s ahead of them… so they know where they’re expected to go (and can see what it takes to get there)!
In the process, though, it’s key to avoid creating a one-size-fits-all, linear path that ignores employees’ strengths and training. Instead, advisory firm owners should recognize at least four baseline career tracks that emerge in a prototypical independent advisory firm. Each track may cater to a particular employee’s strengths and goals, including Financial Planning (for big-picture, strategic thinkers), Advisory (for relationship-driven individuals that like to make things happen), Investment Management (for aspiring CFAs who like research), and Client Services And Operations (for organizers who love to serve others).
Ultimately, implementing a variety of career tracks will provide employees clear paths to travel along as they progress through the firm (and give managers a roadmap they can use to proactively lead their teams rather than reactively telling them how to improve their performance). But first, the leadership team must also have the right mindset, expectations, and plan in place. Once that’s done, and career tracks are established, advisory firms can foster continuous communication and develop talent far more efficiently, by showing them where they can go and letting them step up to the desired challenge and opportunity.
Welcome back to the 186th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Samantha Bezar. Samantha is the director of digital marketing for Thrive Financial Services, a hybrid RIA and insurance agency near Philadelphia generating more than $6 million of annual revenue while serving nearly 500 clients. What's unique about Samantha, though, is the way she's built a scalable marketing solution for the firm, with a combination of digital marketing and in-person events that have lifted the revenue of the firm from a few hundred thousand dollars to more than $6 million of revenue in under 3 years.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Thrive's seminar marketing approach, why they've chosen to do education-only events and not dinner seminars, the way they initially drew participants by relying on buying third-party mailing lists but dropped their cost of client acquisition by more than half by doing their own Facebook digital marketing to fill in-person seminar events, the exact process that Thrive goes through to target their ideal prospects on Facebook, engage them to register for the seminar and confirm they actually attend, and the metrics of how a $3,000 marketing spend can turn into tens of thousands of dollars of new revenue, which just gives Thrive more money to reinvest into their marketing process to further accelerate their growth.
We also talk about how Thrive transitioned to webinar events in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, why the company still chooses to do its webinars as an in-person live stream and not just a recorded webinar or voice-over PowerPoint approach, the tools and technology that Thrive uses to deliver its webinars and handle its online registration process, and how Samantha determined that text messaging can actually be a highly effective marketing tool to ensure prospects follow through.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Samantha shares her own journey of learning digital marketing in the advisory world without a background as a financial advisor, the importance of viewing all marketing as experiments where it's okay to try something out and fail because that's the only way you find out a new approach that works, and why Samantha sees marketing automation software tools as the key to executing scalable marketing for an advisory firm in the future.
Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the economic buzz of both Presidential candidate Joe Biden's proposed tax plan (with significant ramifications to advisors and their clients with incomes greater than $400,000/year), and the potential that a new economic stimulus package may be forthcoming next week as Congress comes back from its July recess to consider more stimulus checks, an extension of unemployment benefits, and even the possibility of a major infrastructure spending plan or a payroll tax cut.
Also in the news this week is a major shift in the industry's processes for taking exams, as the CFP Board announces that it will allow both the July-rescheduled-to-September and also the later November CFP exams to be taken virtually via a new Remote Proctoring process, and FINRA and NASAA similarly announce that major industry licensing exams from the SIE to the Series 6, 7, 63, 65, and 66, are all becoming available online and virtually.
From there, we have a number of articles about the changing industry landscape, including a look at how independent broker-dealers are slowly and steadily reinventing to become broader advisor-support platforms that now generate the majority of their revenue from fees (and not commissions), when advisors should consider switching broker-dealers (despite the hassle it entails), and why advisors looking to retire soon are increasingly eyeing a transition to RIAs as a way to queue up the sale and exit (for both the more appealing economics of RIA deals that often pay cash upfront instead of requiring a broker-dealer-style Earn-Out, and the more favorable tax treatment of actually being able to sell 'the business' instead of simply taking ongoing revenue-sharing payments in the later years).
We also have a few marketing-and-sales-related articles this week, from a look at how advisory firms are adopting more digital marketing strategies as a complement to their traditional sales approach that in some cases is increasing their sales conversion rates above their pre-pandemic levels, what it takes to truly establish yourself as a credible "authority" in your niche or specialization, and why it's so uncomfortable to try to learn a sales "script" to explain your value but why it's actually natural for it to feel uncomfortable (and still important to do anyway!).
We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of setting goals for yourself: the first looks at how it's valuable to have big goals to figure out where you want to go, but success is all about breaking down "big" goals into small ones that are actually achievable (and can help feed our motivation to keep going); the second similarly explores how setting too many goals can seem appealing but may actually slow us down from achieving any of them; and the last provides a powerful reminder that it's great to think about "big" goals that create big business success, but as the pandemic has highlighted, it's really those who create sustainable goals that actually survive and thrive when the inevitable downturns come (and have more of an opportunity to generate big successes in the long run!).
Enjoy the 'light' reading!
When financial advisors have the urge to create original content for their clients (or with hopes of attracting new ones), the overwhelming volume of resources that are already publicly available for consumers can easily create the impression that there’s nothing new or unique to say... or worse, that no one wants to hear their own perspective and insights. The end result is that many advisors simply give up before they ever get started, out of the fear that they will have nothing impactful to create or contribute. Yet the reality is that often, creating meaningful content that connects with clients and prospects can be as simple as just answering the questions they’re already asking!
In our 38th episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication expert Carl Richards explore some of the straightforward ways to create content to enhance relationships with existing clients or deepen a connection with prospects, without feeling overly burdened to “be original”, and how to overcome the “analysis paralysis” that comes with trying to choose the “perfect” topic (that doesn’t actually need to be so perfect!). Because ultimately, the biggest roadblocks to creating content are often put up by our own inner critics that create unrealistically high expectations (as in the end, clients and prospects simply want content that shares something relevant and of interest to them).
One simple solution for choosing timely and relevant topics for client and prospect communication is for advisors to track the questions they’re already being asked – especially those that are asked multiple times by different clients – and to create content by answering those most frequently asked questions. By preparing thoughtful, thorough answers that address these questions, advisors can easily create content that by definition is already on the minds of clients and prospects… but in an even more efficient manner that reaches an audience of many (versus answering the same question one client at a time!). Similarly, another strategy to cultivate content ideas is just to notice the environment around you – the ideas that are compelling, the conversations that stick in your head, and articles or stories that have a personal impact to you (and would therefore feel meaningful to share with others).
Having a system in place to capture ideas as they come can also help organize (and later, prioritize) potential topics to develop into shareable marketing content. Notably, there are several tools that can help keep track of content ideas, including apps like Evernote, Google Keep, Apple Voice Memos, Pocket, or even a simple physical notebook or daily planner.
Equally important is establishing a habit of regularly scheduling time to work on developing the ideas, as well as devoting time to review and reflect on the ideas that have been captured. And advisors can leverage tools like Google Analytics for quantative feedback on overall engagement to understand what kind of content really is resonating (or not).
Ultimately, the key point is that most financial advisors already have more than enough interest and knowledge to create rich and valuable content that will be well-received by clients and prospects… simply by focusing on the questions they’re already being asked, and translating the news and events around them into the messages and information that their clients and prospects need to hear. Establishing a system to capture ideas, and developing a regular practice of reviewing those ideas, can be helpful when organizing and prioritizing relevant topics that will be valuable to readers. And committing to a regular routine of actually creating the content will help keep the process on track, by creating a system that the advisor can be accountable to in the first place!
Disagreements over money are commonly cited as the number one reason couples divorce, and financial advisors often find themselves in the middle (or as the target!) of client fights. Yet while fighting and conflict are often thought of as negative activities that should be avoided (or simply ignored) as much as possible, the reality is that client conflicts are difficult to avoid and not easy to resolve, especially when they involve money, and in practice, not all client conflicts are negative. In fact, they can actually provide advisors with opportunities to better understand their clients and strengthen relationships – not only between the feuding clients but between the advisor and client as well!
Accordingly, advisors can leverage conflicts amongst clients with basic communication skills and mediation strategies to strengthen the relationship and, in some instances, even their bottom line. In one study that surveyed roughly 1,300 financial planners, researchers found that most (74%) of the respondents had very often worked with emotionally distraught clients, and that nearly half had mediated arguments between married couples. Furthermore, a majority of advisors in the same study indicated that by discussing sensitive, personal, non-financial issues with clients, they improved communication between family members, and seemed to promote better alignment of clients with their core values. And for 39% of the advisors, these discussions even helped to increase their business!
When helping clients through conflict, financial advisors may recognize the “four horsemen of the apocalypse” that include the types of unproductive fighting styles that can damage a relationship, such as criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. Of these ‘four horsemen’, stonewalling is the most dangerous as it can be an indicator that the fighting individuals have essentially given up on the relationship, accepting that there is no resolution to be found. By avoiding or reframing these communication styles, though, fighting can be a productive exercise in helping individuals better understand each other and brainstorm new ideas for collaboration, compromise, and agreement.
Important strategies for financial advisors who are interested in deepening their skills to help clients experiencing conflict include simple de-escalation techniques (e.g., using calm behavior, politely paraphrasing what the client says, and taking a short break from the situation). The goal of these techniques is to offer the agitated client a chance to cool off, to allow the advisor to empathetically connect with the client, and for everyone involved to catch their breath and remain objective.
And when client fights involve the advisor as the target of anger or hostility, it is important for advisors to remain calm and impartial for the relationship with the client to continue developing over time. Some steps the advisor can use to maintain a healthy dialogue with their client include 1) using a ‘soft’ start-up approach by taking responsibility and slowing the conversation down, 2) sending and receiving verbal attempts to soothe and repair the dialogue and diffuse negativity, 3) being willing to compromise, 4) moving the conversation to a place of mutual understanding and respect, and 5) addressing emotional injuries as appropriate, allowing time for both parties to heal from the argument.
The key point is that advisors can ultimately benefit when helping their clients through difficult conflicts, even when they themselves are participants in these conflicts. And by learning when to use certain communication skills and mediation techniques to deal with client fights, advisors can better understand their clients, help them communicate more effectively with other family members, and develop deeper trust and long-lasting relationships with them.
