feed - Part 56

Lessons Learned In Building A Successful Podcast After 100 Episodes

February 25, 2019 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Nerd's Eye View

The first time I heard a podcast as a listener, I knew it was something I wanted to do myself.

For me, the moment came when listening to a podcast called “This Is Your Life” by Michael Hyatt back in the summer of 2013 when I was on my own journey in finding a better work/life balance and stumbled upon Hyatt’s podcast on personal leadership.

The weekly episodes quickly became a weekly habit for me, and I was virtually always able to find at least one useful takeaway. The commitment was easy; I usually listened with it in the background while driving someplace or another, or while taking my daughter (back then I only had 1!) for a neighborhood walk in the stroller. Yet the connection was powerful. With the podcast playing in my ear, it felt like Hyatt was literally in my head, and that when he talked about his struggles, I was sharing in his journey and he was talking directly to me!

At that point, I resolved to launch my own podcast. As someone who writes very “long form” content, I’ve always been cognizant that there are many people who might be interested in what we have to share, but will simply never read a long “Kitces-style” article. So an alternative format – a podcast – was clearly a plus, as a different way to produce content and reach a slightly different audience that was more interested in learning through hearing than via reading. And I hoped that I’d be able to create a deeper connection with my audience by creating the same kind of "audio intimacy" that drew me to Hyatt’s work as well.

And so I resolved that, for 2014, I would have two strategic goals: 1) launch a podcast; 2) launch this “side business” idea that I had, called XY Planning Network. In reality, #2 launched first and grew so quickly that it consumed all my time to do #1 (not to mention that we separately launched the XYPN Radio podcast in the summer of 2015)! Life doesn’t always turn out as planned! And as a result, I didn’t manage to circle back to starting my own podcast until the summer of 2016, with a final launch at the start of 2017.

Now nearly 2 years, 100 episodes, and 1.6 million(!) downloads later, I’ve learned a lot about what it takes – and what not to do! – when launching a podcast and building an audience. And so, in the hopes that it is useful to at least a few others who may be considering whether to start a podcast as well, I share with you my journey and the lessons learned along the way!

#FASuccess Ep 112: Finding The Time To Get The Right People Into The Right Seat Of Your Advisory Firm, With Andrea Schlapia

February 19, 2019 07:13 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 112th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Andrea Schlapia. Andrea is the founder of Ironstone, a practice management coaching and consulting firm that works primarily with midsize advisory firms that are struggling with the actual business execution challenges of transitioning from a practice to a business.

What's unique about Andrea, though, is that she's built upon her own prior experience as a financial advisor and a practice management consultant to develop what she calls the Fundamental 4 pillars of practice management and has developed tools and strategies to support each of the domains across the four pillars.

In this episode, we talk in depth about Andrea's Fundamental 4 business framework of strategic planning, business development, operational effectiveness, and the human element, how most advisory firms have a natural strength in strategy and business development but may struggle with the operational effectiveness and human element, why Andrea advocates that, ultimately, a firm should take one development day per month where they close their doors to clients and solely work on the business instead of in the business, and why it's so important to find the time to be ultra-selective in how you hire and develop your team in the first place.

We also talked about Andrea's actual process for conducting interviews with prospective hires. Her four steps of phone screening, in-office interviews, a meeting over a meal, and what she calls an office simulation to really test a prospective hire's skills in a real-world business setting, the assessment tools, including PXT Select and Myers-Briggs, that Andrea uses to evaluate whether a candidate really has the capabilities and personality to be a good fit for the firm, and her approach to doing what she calls not performance evaluations, but performance feedback sessions with all team members on a quarterly basis.

And be certain to listen to the end, where why sometimes even A plus advisors with their clients may still only be C plus business owners, and how to lift your own business owner and implementation grade by steadily building up the time you're dedicating to developing your team and working on your own Fundamental 4.

So whether you're interested in the tools you can use in the interview and onboarding process to make sure you get the right people into the right role at your firm, how to carve out enough time to work on your business instead of in your business, or how to make sure run an intensive interview process efficiently, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

Kitces & Carl Ep 02: How To Price Your Financial Planning Services

February 14, 2019 10:16 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Kitces & Carl Podcast Practice Management

For most of the financial advice industry’s history, figuring out compensation has been relatively straightforward, as the commission rate that a broker received was set by the manufacturer of the products that were sold. And even as the industry moved more towards the investment management (AUM) model, compensation rates became a little less rigid, the standard fee of 1% of assets under management acted as a firm pricing anchor. However, with the shift in recent years to holistic, advice-centric approach – where advisors sell the value of their personal time and advice and can ask for any price they want – clear pricing standards have gone out the window.

In our second episode of “Kitces & Carl”, Michael Kitces and financial advisor communication guru Carl Richards sit down to discuss the question of establishing a price for your financial planning services, why many advisors feel such anxiety over setting (and sticking to) their pricing model, the ways in which advisors can communicate their value to prospects and clients to justify their price, and why, many times, problems around pricing are really the result of our own inward confidence problems.

Because the reality is that advisors offering holistic planning are essentially rudderless when it comes to knowing how much to charge for their services. For the first time we, as advisors, have to convince our clients (and ourselves) that the intangible service that we provide is worth at least the price at which it makes sense to operate as a viable business. As while value in the past was defined by the products brokers had access to, now that “value piece” is far more esoteric and relies not only on our own knowledge and expertise, but (sometimes more importantly) in our ability to communicate effectively enough that it results in positive client outcomes!

And since consumers have access to far more information than they did in the past, the odds are that, at some point, a prospective client is going to push back on your price and wonder why they should pay you more than some other advisor with a seemingly similar “comprehensive financial planning” offering who charges less… or the inexpensive, automated service from the online robo-“advisor” with a substantial advertising budget. Fortunately, though, by focusing on a niche with unique challenges and by going deeper on issues that that virtually no one else is talking to them about, advisors can have an easier time communicating the value they bring to the table.

More generally, advisors who get questions about their fees might look at their own “lead nurturing” process. Because, if a prospect has opted to sit down with you in the first place, and after uncovering their desired future state, what’s holding them back, and how you can close that gap for them, they still don’t understand why you charge what you do… then the problem might not be with your pricing, but with how you present yourself to the public in the first place.

Ultimately, the key to the pricing conversation is that you, as an advisor, have a story that you believe in around the value that you provide, and can articulate that to clients and prospects. Because once we believe in ourselves and the value that we bring, then we can set a price… and be confident that we are worth what we say. In other words, if at the end of the day you’re concerned about your pricing, be mindful of whether it’s really a problem of whether your price is appropriate for the value you provide… or if you just need to get more confident in your own value proposition in the first place.

#FASuccess Ep 111: Why The Right Advisory Fee To Charge Is The One That Not All Clients Say “Yes” To, With Jim Stackpool

February 12, 2019 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 111th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Jim Stackpool. Jim is the founder of Certainty Advice Group, a practice management consulting firm for financial advisors based in Australia. What's unique about Jim, though, is his particular focus on how to price and demonstrate the value proposition of what he calls non-product-based financial advice, which is increasingly relevant as fiduciary regulation continues to crop up both here in the U.S. and especially in Australia.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how to think about the true value of financial advice. How the expert value of the advisor themselves should be distinct from the products we implement, just as every surgeon uses a scalpel, but the value of the surgeon is not measured in scalpels, why the value of advice is not merely tied to a goals-based conversation but must tie to their real-world complexities, and why in the end we should focus more on the enduring value or what Jim calls the profound value of financial advice that can have material life-changing impacts for clients.

We also talk about how to know whether your advisory services are currently priced appropriately. Why it's actually a problem if you get too many people saying yes to your advisory fee pricing, how even on renewal you should consider raising advisory fees to elevate the business and the work it does with clients, even if you lose a few along the way, and why the AUM model does perhaps have it easier than other pricing models, since fees tend to naturally lift with the growth of the markets, but even under the AUM model, it's still necessary to be reinvesting into your own value proposition of clients or eventually, your fees will naturally drift so high that clients may no longer be willing to pay them.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Jim shares some perspective on the fiduciary regulation changes underway in Australia, where regulators have been even more aggressive in calling out the financial services industry's worst practices in what may culminate in a total breakup of Australia's wirehouse equivalents and a rapid explosion of the Australian independent advisor, akin to the IBD and RIA movements here in the U.S., which raises interesting questions about whether U.S. regulators may also someday become similarly aggressive towards the vertically integrated product distribution model here too.

So whether you're interested in what Australia's sweeping regulatory changes mean for their advice industry, ways in which advisory firms can provide more value to their clients, or how the industry might evolve in the coming decade, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.

The New 1% Advisory Fee: 1% Of Income, Instead Of 1% Of Assets

February 11, 2019 07:06 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Practice Management

The AUM model for financial advisors has experienced tremendous growth over the past 20 years, from the rise of the independent RIA to the broker-dealer shift to fee-based accounts. And despite the rise of critics questioning whether the AUM model is the most effective way to align what the client pays with the value being provided, the accelerating momentum of major firms transitioning to the model suggests that not only is the AUM model here to stay… but there may soon be too many financial advisors using the same AUM model to pursue the same relatively-few households who have sufficient liquid assets available to invest and who are actually willing to delegate them to an advisor in the first place. In fact, if the entire advisory community makes the AUM shift all at once, there may be no more than about 23 clients per advisor available!

Yet the reality is that the opportunity in the marketplace for financial advice goes far beyond just those who have at least $100,000 of investable assets available to roll over to an advisor to manage. In part, this is because some advisors are now shifting to an “Assets Under Advisement” (AUA) model that aims to charge clients not just a percentage of their managed portfolio, but a percentage of their entire net worth (on which the financial advisor is providing holistic financial advice), opening up a larger segment of Mass Affluent (and Millionaire) households who have the financial ability to pay for advice, but not the liquidity to access it by rolling over an investment account (e.g., because their assets are tied up in a 401(k) plan where they’re still working!).

However, the even-bigger opportunity to expand financial advice is not just to shift from charging a percentage of assets to a percentage of net worth, but instead to charge a percentage of income instead. Which opens up yet another swath of consumers – commonly known as the “HENRYs” (short for High Earner, Not Rich Yet) – who may not have substantial assets or net worth, but have more than enough income to pay for advice directly out of their income, whether on an hourly, monthly subscription, or annual retainer basis.

And while for high earners, the most straightforward approach may be to simply shift from charging 1% of assets to 1% of income, the reality is that just as AUM fees are typically tiered on a graduated fee schedule – with higher-percentage fees for smaller portfolios and lower fees for sizable accounts – a percentage-of-income fee could be tiered as well. In fact, at a 2%-of-income fee, even median-income households (earning approximately $60,000/year) become economically feasible to service with advice… for which even a 2%-of-income fee can often be recovered by providing good advice on the other 98%, at a cost that is little more than what such individuals would pay in commissions on even a modest IRA rollover into A-share mutual funds or via an insurance purchase. In other words, charging fee-for-service advice isn't just about the HENRYs, but a far wider range of Earners Wanting Advice Now (EWANs) who have the financial wherewithal to pay for it (as a percentage of the income they have, not the assets they don't!).

The key point, though, is simply to understand that, while the AUM model continues to be popular, and has a lot of benefits that make it easy for consumers to pay and highly scalable, it is naturally limited in market size to those who have liquid portfolios available to manage. While the rising shift to alternative fee-for-service models, particularly a percentage-of-income fee, opens up entirely new “blue oceans” of HENRY and EWAN consumers who are not served today by holistic financial advisors!

#FASuccess Ep 110: Adapting The 4-Hour Work Week Into A Highly Profitable 4-Month Work Year Lifestyle Practice, with Micah Shilanski

February 5, 2019 07:15 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 110th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Micah Shilanski. Micah is a partner with Shilanski & Associates, an independent RIA in Anchorage, Alaska, where Micah personally oversees nearly $130 million of assets under management for almost 160 client households.

What's unique about Micah, though, is that over the past 8 years, he's transitioned from working 70-plus hour work weeks to refining his practice down to the point where he can service all 160 clients while being in the office for only 4 months of the year, an endeavor that he first started simply to get more efficient and better work/life balance, and then had to extend further out of necessity over the past several years to unfortunately support a sick child.

In this episode, we talk about how Micah manages his client workload of meeting processes to be able to sustain 160 clients while being in the office only 4 months of the year. How he boxed together a whopping six or seven client meetings a day for five-week surges in the spring and the fall, the way he handles meeting preparation and client notes in the midst of maintaining such an intensive client meeting schedule, how he sets a communication policy with clients during the onboarding process to set their expectations around his somewhat unusual schedule, and the way Micah overcame his own severe dyslexia to keep rigorous notes into CRM by using a combination of audio dictation tools and video emails to clients.

We also talk about how Micah has managed to not only maintain his practice but grow at 20% a year, despite only being in the office for 4 months, by focusing into a niche of helping federal employees with their retirement benefits. How he created his own niche website, plan-your-federal-retirement.com, to reach prospective clients, the seminar marketing strategy he uses to get even more clients into his niche, why he charges and can get a $500 initial consultation fee even for prospects that find him on the internet, and how by focusing into a niche, he's able to confidently charge above-average fees of $4,000 for an initial plan plus 1.75% of assets under management, because, as Micah emphasizes, there's nothing wrong with charging a premium fee when you genuinely offer specialized and premium service to a niche clientele who simply can't get the same expertise and experience anywhere else.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Micah shares the initial steps that any financial advisor can take to at least start to improve their own personal efficiency in the office, and how despite his time out of the office and the staff support he needs to make that happen, he's ultimately still been able to maintain his target of a nearly 70% EBOC take-home compensation from his $130 million AUM practice.

The Latest In Financial Advisor #FinTech (February 2019)

February 4, 2019 07:07 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Technology & Advisor FinTech

Welcome to the February 2019 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 news that eMoney Advisor founder Edmond Walters is back, with a new financial planning software competitor… but one targeting an entirely different (ultra-high-net-worth) clientele than traditional financial planning tools, such that MoneyGuidePro and Envestnet (owner of FinanceLogix) have actually partnered with Walters’ new Apprise Labs to develop the solution (aptly named “MoneyLogixPro”).

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

RightCapital raises a $3.7M Series A round to scale its competition with MoneyGuidePro, eMoney Advisor, and NaviPlan in the enterprise market
AdvicePay raises a $2M seed extension round by crowdfunding within the advisor community itself to power a new enterprise solution for hybrid broker-dealers offering fee-for-service financial planning
MoneyGuidePro rolls out its own new “downmarket” solution for non-CFPs dubbed MoneyGuideOne, and announces a new, more advanced financial planning software solution to be called MoneyGuideElite
Plaid acquires Quovo to turn its account aggregation services into more actionable APIs that might actually move client assets (or manage them from afar)

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month's column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including Bridge Financial’s new portfolio performance reporting solution for small-to-mid-sized RIAs, Timeline’s new retirement distribution software to model the impact of dynamic spending rules and dynamic asset allocation on sustainable withdrawal rates, the rollout of two new client survey/feedback tools to better measure client engagement, and a look at how the latest T3 Advisor Technology Survey shows that what advisors state is their most important technology is not what they actually spend the most on (raising the question of whether there’s room for higher-priced CRM and financial planning software, and coming price pressure on portfolio performance reporting tools).

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 new 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]!

Weekend Reading for Financial Planners (Feb 2-3)

February 1, 2019 02:58 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of "weekend reading for financial planners" – this week's edition kicks off with the big industry news that eMoney Advisor founder Edmond Walters is "back", with a new high-end financial planning software to support tax, estate, and legacy planning conversations with ultra-high-net-worth clients... positioned not necessarily to compete with traditional financial planning software, but to go beyond it, as the offering is actually being developed in partnership with MoneyGuidePro and Envestnet's Logix planning software.

Also in the news this week is a great series of profiles on the leading "Women In WealthTech", as ThinkAdvisor highlights the rise of gender diversity in enterprise technology for financial advisors (even as the gender diversity of financial advisors ourselves continues to struggle).

From there, we have several articles on the (re-)emergence of fixed indexed annuities, as DPL Financial Partners facilitates the launch of a new no-commission fixed indexed annuity for the RIA channel, Roger Ibbotson publishes a study suggesting that indexed annuities may be a superior fixed income alternative to traditional bonds in a diversified portfolio, and Michael Edesess suggests that real-world annuity contracts may still be too expensive to beat bonds in practice (and for those who wish to pursue the strategies anyway, could accomplish even more by simply using options strategies themselves instead).

We also have a number of career and practice management articles this week, from tips on the first tasks to outsource to a virtual assistant as a solo financial advisor, more tips on how to make your advisory firm more attractive and compelling when hiring talent in the midst of a severe advisor talent shortage, even more tips on how to manage the overwhelm of meetings, and some fascinating insights from an advisor on what she wishes she learned in practice management sessions about running an advisory firm but instead had to learn "the hard way" instead.

We wrap up with three interesting articles, all around the theme of social media and email overwhelm and how to combat it, including: a recent study that analyzed the effects of taking a 1-month break from Facebook and how it not only created more free time (obviously, from the freed up Facebook time) but also lifted up participants' mood and reduced their political polarization (but also their political knowledge as Facebook is a key source of political news and information); the second explores the effects of taking a month off from email as well (hint: most of your emails are not as important as you think they are!); and the last explores the idea of doing a "digital declutter" and that it's not enough to just try to take a break from social media, and instead we have to rethink the kind of digitally-minimalist lifestyle we really want to live (or not).

Enjoy the "light" reading!

#FASuccess Ep 109: How A Retirement Researcher Implements Retirement Planning For His Own Clients, With Jon Guyton

January 29, 2019 07:03 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 108th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Jon Guyton. Jon is the founder of Cornerstone Wealth Advisors, an independent RIA in the Minneapolis area that oversees $240 million in assets under management for about 240 mostly retiree clients.

What's unique about Jon, though, is that he doesn't only run a financial planning firm that serves retirees, he's also contributed to the retirement research himself, with several seminal articles in the mid-2000s on creating retirement withdrawal rate guardrails and decision rules, and now has spent the past decade actually implementing those strategies with clients and finding out what really works in practice.

In this episode, we talk in depth about Jon's retirement planning approach with his clients. How he separates out a client's prospective retirement expenses into core and discretionary categories, the way he applies decision rules to adjust that retirement spending in subsequent years, and the way he then creates multiple portfolio buckets, each with its own investment policy statement, to handle each of those retirement spending categories but notably does not create a cash bucket for short-term expenses because of the consequences that cash drag can have on actually reducing a client sustainable retirement income in the long run.

We also talk about the unique resident program that Jon created in his firm, similar to a medical resident program, to leverage next-generation talent. Why he deliberately chose a model that brings in young advisors with the plan that they will leave after three years, how having a limited duration financial planning resident program has actually allowed his firm to attract even better talent regardless of geography, and the key traits that Jon has found that really make a financial planning resident and in the long run a financial planner themselves more successful.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Jon shares the challenges he faced in his own advisory firm at the start and how even though today he's the owner of an incredibly successful $240 million AUM practice, in his first year in the business, he qualified for the low income Earned Income Tax Credit and had to continue for nearly 4 more years before he finally reached the point of earning a livable wage from his practice. Because the reality is that the first few years are incredibly difficult for any financial advisor, even those who are incredibly successful in the long run.
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#FASuccess Ep 107: Using Podcasting As A Marketing Strategy To Attract (Retirement Niche) Clients, with Roger Whitney

January 15, 2019 07:03 am 1 Comment CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome back to the 107th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Roger Whitney. Roger is a partner with WWK Wealth Advisors, an independent RIA based in Fort Worth, Texas, where Roger works with a personal client base of retirees with $75 million of assets under management.

What's unique about Roger, though, is that he's been able to attract almost $50 million of those assets in just the past 2 years by launching a niche podcast on retirement that attracts to him affluent baby boomers making the transition to retirement.

In this episode, we talk about the why and how Roger built his "Retirement Answer Man" podcast, the style and format of his podcast and what he's found works to attract listeners, the way he transitions podcast listeners to a webinar that shows prospects a sample client meeting and then invites them to a schedule a fit meeting, and the way he treats his podcast marketing strategy as an orchard to be nurtured and tended and not just a tactic to hunt for more retired clients, even though it's generating a lot of retired clients for him anyways.

We also talk about how Roger focused his advisory firm into a niche of working with retirees. Why his focus with clients is less about financial freedom and more about time freedom, his unique Agile Retirement Management approach to working with retirees that's less about producing the comprehensive financial plan and more about producing what he calls a minimum viable plan and then engaging in constant iteration of what he calls SMART sprints to the next short-term goal or objective, and how despite being what he calls a classically-trained financial planner, that most of Roger's conversations today take more of a coaching approach with clients that focuses as much on human and social capital as their financial capital.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Roger shares how the success of his podcast has now evolved into publishing a book called "Rock Retirement" and creating what he calls the Rock Retirement Club as a way to serve the subset of his listeners who will never realistically hire them to be his financial advisor but are willing to pay to join a community he's created that helps support them in their own do-it-yourself journey through retirement.

So whether you're interested in getting started with podcasting (or building a content marketing strategy), how Roger attracts new clients and builds business through his podcast, why he creates content only for a very specific audience, or how he handles the compliance side of the equation, then we hope you enjoy this episode of Financial Advisor Success!