feed - Part 47

#FASuccess Ep 159: Navigating Financial Advisor Career Opportunities Under The Employee Model, with Kelly Shikany

January 14, 2020 07:08 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 159th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Kelly Shikany. Kelly is a financial advisor and director of wealth management for Lakeside Wealth, a hybrid RIA based in Chesterton, Indiana, right outside Chicago, where Kelly manages a base of nearly $90 million of client assets.

What's unique about Kelly, though, is her decision to not hang her hat as a solo advisor and instead navigate existing advisory firms that have already established the necessary infrastructure to operate the firm, allowing her to focus on clients and not needing to live in an "eat what you kill" grid-based environment.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about Kelly's career path through the advisory industry under the employee model. From starting out as a trust accountant for ERISA plans with Northern Trust, shifting to become a trust officer with an independent trust company, transitioning to the independent channel under the Wells Fargo FiNet platform, and then joining her current firm with an opportunity to grow by servicing clients that the firm acquires in its own efforts to grow.

We also talk about how Kelly grew her client base in the early years by conducting women's circles as a way to network and establish relationships in her small town community. The reason she decided to pursue the CDFA designation as a way to initially differentiate herself, and how ultimately she decided the best way to differentiate herself was simply her ability to have a different kind of conversation with her clients in the first place.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Kelly talks about how she structures her week to maximize personal productivity. Why it's so difficult for most of the employee model to even figure out the right questions to ask when evaluating potential advisor job opportunities, and why it's important to balance a positive desire to be loyal to your firm and clientele with focusing on your own needs to find a fulfilling career and the right place to work as a financial advisor.

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Jan 11-12)

January 10, 2020 03:02 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the industry news that Envestnet is partnering with Dynasty Financial to create a new "Advisor Services Exchange" (ASx), and in the process is taking a small financial stake in Dynasty, raising questions of whether Envestnet is seeking to evolve beyond its technology core into a broader range of advisor services.

Also in the news this week was the announcement that former Congressman Chris Dodd and Barney Frank have filed an Amicus Brief against the SEC regarding Regulation Best Interest (Reg BI) claiming that as the ones who wrote the law itself the SEC misinterpreted the authority they were granted under Dodd-Frank to issue Reg BI (and that therefore the rule should be vacated), the governor of Massachusetts is advocating on behalf of the financial product manufacturers and broker-dealers that the state should consider walking back its fiduciary proposal, and a coalition of trade associations are coming together to make the case that Congress should allow financial advisors to claim the 20% Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction in the future (though it's not clear that Congress will take up any tax legislation this year!).

We also have several articles on practice management and succession planning, including: the benefits of deliberately hiring younger and less experienced (but potentially longer-tenured and more creative) advisors into a firm; the common reasons that Millennial advisors quit their advisory firms; how to better promote a culture of positive work/life balance to avoid burning out next-generation talent; the factors to consider (or not) when trying to select a future successor for the firm; and why the development of next-generation successor leaders in an advisory firm requires a fundamentally different set of talents than what the founder needed to learn to grow the business to that point in the first place.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of generalists versus specialists: the first explores how specialists have more opportunities to succeed but are also more prone to being disrupted and unable to adapt, such that it's important to keep some 'generalist' interests as well; the second dives into research finding that generalists tend to be more successful in slow-moving environments while in an increasingly complex world it's actually the specialists with the domain knowledge to spot opportunities in environments of rapid change; and the last introduces the concept of the 'Generalized Specialist', who develops a core competency of expertise but also tries to deliberately maintain a broader multi-disciplinary perspective as well (to be better able to both adapt and integrate new, disparate ideas).

Enjoy the 'light' reading!

#FASuccess Ep 158: Leveraging Outsourcers To Go From Employee To Independent Without Building It All Yourself, with Stephanie Bruno

January 7, 2020 07:02 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 158th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Steph Bruno. Steph is the founder of Sea to Peak Financial Advisors, an independent RIA with offices based in Seattle and Denver that oversees nearly $70 million in assets under management for 45 affluent clients.

What's unique about Steph, though, is that she transitioned to launching her own independent firm only after a 15-year career as an employee in large and mid-sized financial services firms and recognized that she didn't want to manage the infrastructure of actually establishing and running a new firm by herself, so she found an outsourcing partner that from the start would work with her to provide that structure so she could simply focus on what she wanted to focus on, serving the clients she wanted to serve the way she wanted to serve them.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about what led Steph to take the leap and walk away from a stable employee paycheck to build her own firm from scratch. How she initially tucked under another established hybrid advisory firm for support to grow, the realization that owning her own clients meant she'd have to market for her own clients, and now she was going to market herself anyway, she may as well break out entirely on her own, and why Steph decided to hire a personal coach to help her not when many other advisors do, which is once they hit a capacity wall and need to figure out how to best structure the practice going forward, but instead to get coaching support right from the start to help give her the courage and confidence to get through the difficult early years in the first place.

We also talk about Steph's financial planning process with clients and how she starts by creating a money meaning map using mind mapping software to help provide clients a deliverable to demonstrate her value after the very first prospect meeting, the way she integrates life planning conversations into her planning process, the challenge that Steph had in rebooting her marketing after relocating to a new city, and the way she's beginning to further shift her focus towards a niche of working with busy executives to better strengthen and focus her own marketing process, in particular with e-books and networking meetings going forward.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Steph talks about how, if she'd do it all over again, she would have taken the leap even sooner, but how even though it's worked out, the early years are still incredibly difficult. The role that both her coach and advisor-peers' support played in getting her through those challenging years early on, the reasoning she used when she decided to take an early withdrawal from her IRA to invest in herself in launching her new practice a decade ago, and the importance of recognizing the difference between doing work you're good at and being proud of it versus doing the work you really love to do.

The Latest In Financial Advisor #FinTech (January 2020)

January 6, 2020 07:06 am 4 Comments CATEGORY: Technology & Advisor FinTech

Welcome to the January 2020 issue of the Latest News in Financial Advisor #FinTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors and wealth management!

This month's edition kicks off with the big announcement that Fiserv is spinning off its 'tiny' (at least relative to Fiserv’s banking and payments business) investment services unit, valued at $880M, to a private equity firm focused on aggressively growing Fiserv’s presence in the enterprise ‘WealthTech’ space, positioning the company to become an even more direct competitor for large-broker-dealers and large-RIA enterprises with Envestnet, Fidelity, Morningstar, and Broadridge, in what may spur a heavy reinvestment cycle into more capable enterprise systems for large advisor platforms.

From there, the latest highlights also include a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:

Invesco acquires RedBlack rebalancing software as asset managers increasingly look to (vertically integrated) model marketplaces as the future of ETF distribution
Pershing launches its own “Subscribe” fee-based annuity marketplace, integrated directly to its Managed Accounts platform, to compete against Envestnet’s own new Annuity Exchange
Merrill Lynch abandons the ‘bring your own device’ approach of the 2010s and stakes its compliance oversight in the 2020s on brokers carrying two smartphones (personal and business)
SEI launches a Developer Portal with new APIs in an attempt to become more of an advisor FinTech platform hub (perhaps eyeing the potential demise of TD Ameritrade’s VEO after the Schwabitrade merger closes?)

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month's column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including Envestnet announcing new enhancements to PortfolioCenter (and signaling that PortfolioCenter isn’t ‘doomed’ to be deprecated under Envestnet, and may simply become ‘Tamarac Lite” instead), Schwab launches a robo-for-retirement-income offering that overlays tax-sensitive retirement distributions on top of its robo-investments-plus-human-CFPs offering, Investor.com rolls out a new advisor-vetting platform that aims to present consumers aggregated regulatory data to spot relevant disclosures and conflicts, and Vanguard capstones its 2-year battle with TD Ameritrade over pay-to-play access by dropping stock and option trading commissions to $0 (on top of its already-free ETF trading platform) as TD Ameritrade is queued up for a sale.

And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular new “Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map” as well.

I hope you're continuing to find this column on financial advisor technology to be helpful. Please share your comments at the end and let me know what you think!

*And for #AdvisorTech companies who want to submit their tech announcements for consideration in future issues, please submit to [email protected]!

Helping Affluent Clients Develop A Money Mission Statement To Facilitate Generational Wealth Transfer

January 1, 2020 07:06 am 5 Comments CATEGORY: Client Trust & Communication

Over the years, study after study has shown wealthy families are often worried about passing along their wealth to children, and the risk that those children may end out being “spoiled”, overly concerned about material things, and generally naïve about the value of money. Which is understandable given the extensive research into the correlation between negative (and sometimes tragic) outcomes and so-called “affluenza” (a lack of motivation and sense of isolation often seen in young individuals who are very wealthy). Compounding these worries, families often have difficulty discussing wealth and money with their children - often out of fear that pointing out the size of a potential inheritance will just amplify the problem – even though this lack of communication may just leave their children with “surprise” large inheritances that they have no idea how to handle.

Financial advisors, however, are in a unique position to help their wealthy clients in such situations by showing them how to have conversations about money with their families. Because while families may be uncomfortable and uninformed about how to talk about money, financial advisors talk about money for a living and often thrive on having these conversations! Moreover, helping clients improve their money communication skills not only serves to strengthen relationships within the family between family members themselves, but it also strengthens the relationship the advisor has with the family as a whole. Which is important when dealing with clients who are planning for wealth transfers, as it is very common for heirs to leave their family’s original advisor once they come into their wealth (and similarly is very common for surviving spouses to switch advisors after their spouses pass away).

When creating a process to help clients with money conversations, advisors can start by focusing on three core components: purpose, practice, and people. Money mission statements are a particularly effective way for clients to crystallize their purpose around money, as they are essentially declarations of the family’s long-term goals, attitudes, and beliefs about money. They can serve as powerful tools offering a framework for families to structure conversations around money and wealth with each other, ideally lasting through future generations. Meanwhile, money mission statements also help families practice not just talking about money, but also using it (and teaching children to use it) in ways that are consistent with the values they identified in their mission statements. Finally, involving the right people into the process – family members and relevant professionals across disciplines, such as tax professionals, estate planners, and financial therapists and/or psychologists – can ensure that support is available in all areas where it is needed.

Some considerations that advisors can take into account when creating a process to use with their clients include: 1) how to structure the actual process – how frequently will meetings with clients be held, at what cost, and which professionals will be included in the meetings; 2) how to market the process – will open client appreciation events be held to facilitate money conversations between families or will the process involve only private family meetings, and what channels will be used to advertise the new services; and 3) how to network with other professionals – which professional associations and resources can be leveraged for expertise and support, and what types of training opportunities might offer relevant experience?

Ultimately, the key point is that helping clients identify their values and beliefs around wealth is an essential starting point for advisors to guide their clients through the anxiety they may have around money conversations. By becoming comfortable with and gaining confidence in talking about money with other family members, families will have an easier time imparting core values to future generations slated to inherit wealth and preparing them to use their own assets responsibly and with purpose.

#FASuccess Ep 157: Building Your Own Personal Brand To Complement And Not Compete With Your Advisory Firm, with Peter Lazaroff

December 31, 2019 07:31 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 157th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Peter Lazaroff. Peter is a shareholder and the co-chief investment officer of Plancorp, an independent RIA based in St. Louis that oversees nearly $4.4 billion of assets under management for almost 1,300 affluent clients.

What's unique about Peter, though, is the way that he's been able to build his own personal brand as he's grown his career, both as a mechanism to build a client base of nearly $100 million of assets under management while still in his 20s and 30s to help him navigate career opportunities as well to build even further.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how exactly Peter built his personal brand. From simply proactively taking notes on what he was already reading and sharing them with co-workers to launching an email newsletter and pursuing networking meetings as a chance to build his email list, pivoting later to a blog that would further allow him to expand his readership and reach, publishing a book to go even deeper still to reach his target clientele, and how now his personal brand is producing such strong results in generating new clients that his advisory firm is investing into his personal brand to help refine it even further.

We also talk about the practical challenges of building a personal brand inside of a larger advisory firm. Why Peter's original firm was comfortable with him launching a newsletter but concerned about having him own a separate blog, how Peter got his new advisory firm on board with his branding efforts by first spending time writing for the firm's own website to show his value, the way Peter handles his blog content for compliance purposes and why he set up a separate LLC structure to own the intellectual property of his blog content and email list and then licensed it back to his advisory firm, and why Peter, despite the fact that many advisory firms are wary of their employees building personal brands outside of the business, thinks that firms allowing employees to do so will actually have a better chance at attracting and retaining the most ambitious, growth-oriented advisors.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Peter shares why he wishes he had launched his blog website earlier rather than just sending out an email newsletter. The importance of being proactive and getting your firm's leadership and compliance officer on board to be successful in building a personal brand that will complement and not compete with the firm, and the realization that Peter had after getting immersed into the so-called FinTwit community of financial advisors on Twitter, that while it's great to connect with colleagues through blogging and social media, in the end, it's crucial to stay focused on the target clients you want to reach to really have success in the world of blogging and social media.

2019 Highlights – The Top 20 Nerd’s Eye View Blog Posts You Might Have Missed

December 30, 2019 07:04 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Nerd's Eye View

As we enter the 2019 holiday season and the year (and decade!) comes to a close, I am once again so thankful to all of you, the ever-growing number of readers who continue to regularly visit this Nerd’s Eye View blog (and share the content with your friends and colleagues, which we greatly appreciate!). As we entered the decade of the 2010s, this blog was still in a nascent stage on the Kitces.com website, with just 1,225 people coming to read the entire month of December 2009; today, far more people than that read our blog posts in just the first two hours after each article is published and emailed out to everyone! And I have even more exciting ideas about how we can do more and be even better for the advisor community in 2020… stay tuned for more announcements in the coming weeks!

We recognize that although this blog is a weekly habit for thousands of advisors, not everyone reads every blog post that is released from Nerd’s Eye View throughout the year. As many of you noted in response to our recent Reader Survey, most choose which articles to read based on headlines and topics that are of interest. Yet in practice, this means that an article once missed is often never seen again, ‘overwritten’ (or at least bumped out of your Inbox!) by the next day’s, week’s, and month’s worth of content that comes along.

Accordingly, just as I did last year and in 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014, I've compiled for you this Highlights List of our top 20 articles in 2019 that you might have missed, including some of our most popular episodes of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. So whether you're new to the blog and #FASuccess podcast and haven't searched through the Archives, or simply haven't had the time to keep up with everything, I hope that some of these will (still) be useful for you! And as always, I hope you'll take a moment to share podcast episodes and articles of interest with your friends and colleagues as well!

In the meantime, I hope you're having a safe and happy holiday season. Thanks again for another successful year in 2019, and I hope you enjoy all the new features and resources we'll be rolling out in 2020, too!

#FASuccess Ep 156: Establishing Next Generation Career Tracks And Business Development Training For Long-Term Sustainability, with DeLynn Zell

December 24, 2019 07:05 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 156th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is DeLynn Zell. DeLynn is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bridgeworth Financial, a hybrid RIA based in Birmingham, Alabama that oversees nearly $1.6 billion of assets under management for almost 2,000 clients.

What's unique about DeLynn and her firm, though, is the way they decided from the start to build an advisory firm that would be sustained past the founders, and have taken steps over the years to establish the necessary career tracks, and equity and compensation structures to attract and retain next-generation talent for the firm in order to be sustainable for the long run.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about the four-tier career track that Bridgeworth has created. From a planning coordinator who focuses on the technical work for a base salary, to associate advisors who are involved with client meetings but also have the responsibility to start networking to establish themselves in the community; lead advisors who have the primary responsibility of relationship management and some incentives for business development; and partners who have not only a heavier responsibility for business development but also a greater financial participation to incentivize their ongoing efforts to keep growing the firm and its equity value.

We also talk about how Bridgeworth structures its compensation for partners. The unique way the firm allocates partner salary based on credits for both their business development and revenue or other leadership responsibilities to compensate their ongoing work in the business as separate from their equity ownership of the profits, which in turn is based on what they originally brought to the business when it was formed, how and why Bridgeworth is reinvesting into the business development training for its next-generation advisors so they too can become eligible to become a partner in the future, and the way the firm is developing advisor teams that each have their own specializations to support their individual business development activities under one common firm-wide umbrella.

And be certain to listen to the end, where DeLynn talks about how, even with the long-term success in the business, it was still incredibly difficult in the early years. Why she thinks in the long run, the advisory business is an especially good fit for women; how the gender split of CFP professionals may shift in the future; and why the most important thing when selecting an advisory firm to build your career is not the firm's compensation or particular role, but instead, its culture and whether it's a place you want to be in the long run, and then to let the role and your opportunity evolve as it may over time in a firm and culture you trust.

Office Hours

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#FASuccess Ep 155: Eschewing A Bricks-And-Mortar Office For Reduced Overhead And (Virtual) Flexibility, With Derek Notman

December 17, 2019 07:09 am 3 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 155th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Derek Notman. Derek is the founder of Intrepid Wealth Partners, operates as an agent for New York Life and an IAR for Eagle Strategies, and oversees nearly $50 million of assets under management for almost 200 clients.

What's unique about Derek, though, is the way that he's evolved his advisory firm from a traditional bricks-and-mortar office space into an entirely virtual practice, born out of sheer necessity when he moved halfway across the country for an advisory firm merger that fell through and then had to figure out how to operate from two office locations, and evolved into a firm that has no office space at all.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about Derek's journey from a high-volume bricks-and-mortar office-based practice to an entirely virtual one. From starting out as an insurance agent where the pressure was on generating a high volume of clients that ultimately culminated in a practice of more than 1,000 clients in his first 10 years, how a move from where Derek started in Vermont out to Wisconsin forced him to start meeting with his team and then eventually clients using video chat, the way Derek eventually built out the entire virtual team he operates with today, and the way Derek has been able to grow his income and his freedom by transitioning nearly 80% of his clients away to other advisors while working with his clients sometimes as far as a continent away.

We also talk about how Derek's efforts on growth and business development have changed over the years. From the way he aggressively sought out networking opportunities and referrals in person to expand his client base in the early years, to a shift of generating 100% of his new clients online and virtually today through the use of a blog and social media, his decision to create a narrower niche focus on small business owners and CEOs, and how declaring that he works virtually with clients right on his homepage as their "virtual wealth partner" has actually helped him to attract new clients by promising not to meet with them in person.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Derek talks about why he regrets having tried to build a big practice in a bricks-and-mortar office, the pain points he's worked through in trying to get a large insurance company on board with his virtual model, where the greater challenge was not running his firm virtually and digitally, but simply trying to market for clients online, and how Derek is now trying to teach other advisors the virtual tools and systems that he had to figure out the hard way.