feed - Part 7

#FA Success Ep 380: Expanding Capacity For $500M Of Organic AUM Growth In Just 4 Years By Increasing The Density Of Team Talent, With Andrew Leonard

April 9, 2024 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

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Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 380th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Andrew Leonard. Andrew is the Managing Partner of Geometric Wealth Advisors, an RIA based in Washington, D.C., that oversees approximately $750 million in assets under management for about 200 client households.

What's unique about Andrew, though, is how his firm has been able to triple its AUM in the past 4 years while offering a high-touch client experience by adopting the approach of the management consulting clients he specializes in, first assessing how many new staff members they can hire and then train properly in order to, as Andrew says, increase the density talent on the team, and only then deciding how many new clients to bring on in a given year based on how quickly they've determined they can grow their team.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how lessons from Andrew's niche, partners at the "Big 3" management consulting firms, inform Geometric's deliberate hiring and training processes, why Andrew hired a Chief Operating Officer relatively early in the firm's growth cycle (before he even hit $5M in revenue) to handle the growing people-management challenges of the firm, and how Andrew's firm has been able to maintain a strong company culture despite operating in a fully virtual environment by still including ongoing in-person get-togethers with the whole team.

We also talk about the high-touch services Andrew's firm offers its high-income clients, including how Andrew and his team shop for the best mortgage rates for clients among a curated group of lenders (and the way the firm systematized its approach to finding refinance opportunities for its clients), why Andrew decided to offer in-house tax services (after initially outsourcing to a CPA they worked with closely) despite the expense of having CPAs on staff, and how Andrew's firm integrates unique private equity investment opportunities available to its clients into the firm's broader portfolio management philosophy.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Andrew shares how a growing staff count has helped his firm navigate the "Dangerous Middle" experienced by firms as they grow from $200 million of AUM to $2 billion in AUM (even if it means tighter profit margins in the short run), how Andrew's decision to serve a specific niche has led to a steady flow of prospective clients referrals (and when hiring, interest from former consulting firm employees looking for a career change into a financial planning firm like Andrew's), and how Andrew's growing boredom over the ongoing service of long-term existing clients inspired him to grow his practice into a full-fledged business to experience the fresh intellectual challenges of being an entrepreneur.

So, whether you're interested in learning about how to build "talent density" through a deliberate hiring and training process, how to maintain company culture when operating in a fully-remote environment, or how to navigate the "Dangerous Middle" experienced by growing mid-sized firms, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Andrew Leonard.

#FA Success Ep 379: Creating A Client Deliverable That Focuses On Behavior Over Returns With Custom Intelligrations, With Hans Blake

April 2, 2024 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 379th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Hans Blake. Hans is the founder of Intelligent Investing, an RIA based in Greenville, South Carolina, that oversees $50M in assets under management for 40 client households.

What's unique about Hans, though, is how through a desire to create a more centralized dashboard to help his clients understand their financial health, coupled with a deep fascination with technology and its potential as a behavioral finance tool, led him to create Intelligrations, a form of financial dashboard software that dynamically consolidates a client's key asset data points and assembles them into an easy-to-understand 1-page visual statement of their entire financial picture.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Hans prioritizes Intelligrations to focus on higher-level financial goals and what can actually be controlled to reduce the risk that clients are tempted to financially misbehave, the journey Hans took in developing and building his Intelligrations software within his firm, from an Excel wireframe idea to actual software code that integrates with key industry vendors to automate the input of the right client data, and how Hans and his wife built Intelligent Investing as a couple to be a boutique advisory firm with a white-glove approach to serving high net worth executives approaching retirement to navigate that emotional, financial transition.

We also talk about, how Hans has implemented a set of core values within the firm that not only remind themselves why they do what they do, but also demonstrate their service approach and value to each potential client up front, the discovery process Hans has implemented to learn about a prospect's current financial state, share the firm's passion and core values, and ultimately separate his ideal, long-term clients, from the short-term, emotional ones, and how, through many conversations and initial rejections, Hans realized that "No's" aren't always permanent and, through creativity and patience, a solution to any problem standing in the way will eventually reveal itself.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Hans shares his struggle with imposter syndrome and self-doubt, having to constantly remind himself to reflect on the years of work, experience, and sacrifice it takes to build a firm or innovative technology, and to enjoy, with gratitude, the hard-earned fruits of his labor, Hans' realization that finding what his key skillset was and focusing on it, while also understanding his weak spots and outsourcing the help he needed was incredibly valuable in building his business, and how surprising it is to Hans to struggle to get clients when he's worked hard to build a great firm and an exceptional technology tool, only to find himself surrounded by countless other companies that claim to do the same innovative things that his firm actually does.

And so, with that introduction, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Hans Blake.

The Latest In Financial #AdvisorTech (April 2024)

April 1, 2024 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Technology & Advisor FinTech

Welcome to the April 2024 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – 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!

This month's edition kicks off with the news of an emerging wave of price increases from long-term AdvisorTech vendors like Orion and InvestCloud, which the companies are positioning as a necessary response to the impact of inflation on their underlying costs (from data to staff) and in some cases simply a fix to legacy pricing agreements that were no longer economical… but advisors are criticizing as their PE firm owners simply trying to squeeze more revenue and profitability out of advisory firms (that, to be fair, have had their own lift in profitability from rising markets in 2023, such that software price increases will still have a minimum impact on their overall profitability).

From a broader perspective, though, the pricing changes come in the midst of an environment where a growing number of AdvisorTech providers are increasing prices, from new “upstart” vendors that have improved their capabilities to the point that they can raise fees, to existing vendors repricing to “current market rates”. Which is opening the door to a new wave of lower-priced vendors (e.g., Advyzon and Panoramix competing against Orion)… with the question of whether they, too, will someday raise their prices as they gain traction as well?

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

Startup Wealthfeed raises $2M of venture capital to launch a new digital prospecting tool that helps advisors find prospects in the midst of various “money-in-motion” events who, in theory, would be receptive to a prospective financial advisor reaching out.
SmartAsset launches an Advisor Marketing Platform to help advisors buying SmartAsset leads to automate the follow-up and nurture of those leads, from automated calls and text messaging to nurture emails, in an effort to lift lead quality and conversion rate.

Read the analysis about these announcements in this month’s column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:

Orion has rolled out a new Estate Visualizer tool as an extension of its Orion Planning tools, but it’s not clear if Orion Planning users will want to go that deep into estate planning just to reach next generation clients that they still might not be a good fit to serve.
Vanilla announced a new Scenarios tool to facilitate advisors working with ultra-HNW clients that need to model various four-letter estate planning strategies (e.g., GRATs, SLATs, CRUTs, and ILITs) to show the impact of the advisor’s advice (at least for those clients who still have Federal estate tax exposure).
Behavioral-finance consulting firm Shaping Wealth is developing a new AI conversational agent, dubbed Lydia, whose purpose is not to replace financial advisors in tough behavioral conversations with clients, but instead to replace (or at least, simulate) clients as a way for financal advisors to practice and train in handling difficult client conversations.

And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular “Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map” (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!

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

#FA Success Ep 378: Scaling Growth At 1/4th The Cost Of M&A By Wading Through The “No’s” Of SmartAsset Leads, With Michael Collins

March 26, 2024 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Michael Collins Podcast Featured Image FAS

Welcome back to the 378th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Michael Collins. Michael is the CEO & Founder of WinCap Financial, an RIA based in Boston, Massachusetts, that oversees $80M in assets under management for 70 client households.

What's unique about Michael, though, is that since 2021 he has been able to grow WinCap Financial at a rate of more than $10M of AUM per year through consistently reaching out to leads purchased through SmartAsset, spending $5K/month that turns into $10K in recurring revenue in less than 100 days, an average of more than 4X the return on financial investment than if those clients had been obtained through an acquisition buying at a traditional 2X revenue multiple.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Michael maintains his ongoing $5K/month marketing spend with a process that has an ultimate failure rate of 95% because the financial ROI on the prospects that do close continues to make sense (and he is ultimately not afraid of sorting through the No's to find the right Yes's for WinCap), how Michael supports his SmartAsset conversion rate with a weekly blog that is written by taking the upcoming economic calendar, automating it into a narrative article in his writing style using ChatGPT, and then simply editing it to add his own commentary (which cuts the time it takes for him to write from 2 hours down to 30 minutes), and how Michael has systematized everything from his follow-up emails to text messages to his weekly blog and an ongoing tracking sheet to ensure no prospect slips through the cracks, which allows him to generate his results with a high volume of SmartAsset leads while only spending 8–10 hours/month on the entire process.

We also talk about Michael's advisor journey that began with selling Gateway Computer "Cow Boxes" in college (and getting used to the No's that came along with computer sales) and how Michael channeled that comfort-with-hearing-No into his career shift into wealth management with a process that has a "20 leads to 3 prospects to 1 new client" marketing formula, the reason Michael's decided during the pandemic to take a chance on leaving his then-current advisory firm starting his own RIA (after realizing that he was already doing the important aspects of both client service and business development himself, which made it difficult to justify why his current firm was owed an 80% share of the revenue he was bringing in), and how, when the stress of launching his firm was at an all-time high and a concern for the sustainability of WinCap at the end of 2022 was a major challenge, Michael found that acts of service in education – by becoming a part-time adjunct professor teaching college students – became a key rewarding element of life that kept him going.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Michael shares how moving from a large, firm-supported environment to an independent practice wasn't as hard as he expected because he could easily integrate tools and platforms he was already familiar with (and had the financial ability to get a $50K bank loan to buy a big chunk of SmartAsset leads, which further helped to jump-start his new practice), how surprised Michael was with the amount of support he did get when he launched WinCap, with more than 80% of his previous client base also following him into his new firm within a year, and how Michael had long struggled to take the leap because of the perceived safety and credibility in being part of a larger advisory firm but ultimately found that he could get similar credibility by affiliating his new firm with reputable RIA custodians… which helped Michael's clients, and also Michael himself, find the necessary confidence to move forward.

So, whether you're interested in learning about how to effectively use lead generation tools like SmartAsset to grow and connect with potential clients, how to justify a shift from a large company-supported firm to an independent solo practice or how to use ChatGPT to 'Frankenstein' blog posts that communicate complicated financial information in an easier-to-understand way for your audience, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Michael Collins.

How To Bring A Team Together For A (First-Time, In-Person) Retreat

March 25, 2024 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Practice Management

For the advisor leading a virtual team, the day-to-day can offer a rewarding blend of flexibility, creativity, and productivity; at the same time, though, many of the benefits of remote work can also make it challenging to build a tight-knit team culture. For example, with flexibility comes fewer synchronous interactions, which in turn can result in less innovation, team bonding, and collaboration. While these criteria are not crucial to running a viable business, the reality is that they are still important factors in establishing a flourishing business, and face-to-face time in some form or another can be invaluable for building a strong, aligned team. This isn't to say that founders should throw in the virtual towel and try to convince their team members to move to their "headquarters" (assuming there is, in fact, a brick-and-mortar building for team members to even go to); instead, holding an in-person team retreat once or twice a year can be a powerful way to bring the team together… without having to commit to an in-person office in the long term.

In this article, Kitces Managing Editor Sydney Squires shares how the fully virtual Kitces team constructs its biannual team retreats – and how other leaders of virtual teams can also plan and execute a retreat of their own.

As a starting point, to get the most out of a team retreat, it's important to focus on 1 key theme driving the feeling that team members should leave with at the end of the retreat. This can be curated by assessing present team needs (which means the theme will likely change from retreat to retreat). For example, while a seasoned team who has just finished a busy tax season may need a retreat that leaves them feeling "recharged", a more recently formed team full of new hires may benefit more from feeling "aligned" with each other and with the company's vision. Starting with a theme is essential because it acts as a filter through which all other decisions can be made, from the type of venue that's selected to the different activities planned out.

Whatever theme is selected as the focal point of the retreat, 4 key takeaways can further drive home the main idea: (Re-)Setting The Vision (where company leaders share the past, present, and future vision of the company); Learn Yourself, Learn Your Team (where team members learn about each other and how to work together more cohesively); Connect With Who You Serve (where team members meet with those whom they work with closely, ranging from clients to contractors to Centers Of Influence); and, perhaps most importantly, Be Humans Together (where everyone can enjoy their face-to-face time and bond as a team).

While a great deal of work is involved in the logistical planning of organizing a retreat (e.g., determining dates, selecting a location, finding a venue, purchasing flights, and all of the other 'little' things required to get a virtual team into the same place at the same time), a good checklist – like the downloadable template we provide – can be instrumental in helping leaders ensure that all arrangements are optimally organized. Generally speaking, beginning the retreat planning process at least 4 months before the retreat date usually provides for enough time to work through all of the logistical details and offers enough advance notice to team members – though the time may vary depending on the retreat activities and the level of the retreat organizers' event planning experience.

Ultimately, the key point is that an in-person retreat can be a powerful tool to help a virtual team get many of the benefits of face-to-face collaboration without requiring the team to be physically together all the time. Additionally, with a cohesive theme guiding the agenda and a comprehensive checklist of logistical tasks, a team leader can delegate many of the organizational responsibilities that will contribute to a memorable and productive retreat!

#FA Success Ep 377: Navigating A Major Health Event While Keeping Your Advisory Firm Going And Growing, With Meredith Moore

March 19, 2024 07:01 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

Meredith Moore Podcast Featured Image FAS

Welcome back to the 377th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Meredith Moore. Meredith is the Founder & CEO of Artisan Financial Strategies, a hybrid advisory firm based in Alpharetta, Georgia, that oversees $77M in assets under management for 120 client households.

What's unique about Meredith, though, is how she was able to keep her firm open, navigating through and ultimately growing to more than $1M of annual revenue, despite a diagnosis in 2005 of a 7cm Glioblastoma tumor in her brain, resulting in several years of major surgeries, radiation treatments, and chemotherapies, all the while continuing to see and serve her clients. In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Meredith has met the multitude of challenges she has faced in the last 17 years head-on and found ways to navigate Artisan to ongoing growth despite those trying times, how Meredith decided to amplify her ability to grow the firm by hiring early (before she even had $200,000 in revenue) in the interest of staying ahead of the company's capacity (which, ultimately, jump-started a faster pace of revenue growth for her), and how, after a period of bad hires, Meredith pivoted Artisan's hiring process by leaning into LinkedIn Ads and more clearly articulating both what each role needed to succeed, and what a prospective candidate would really need to be able to do in order to move up and grow with the company in the future.

We also talk about how Meredith's realization that women who outearn their male partners are more apt to involve those partners in financial decisions than men would be, lead her to focus her advisory niche on women senior executives and entrepreneurs who are the household breadwinners, Meredith's whirlwind experience in being accepted as a speaker for TEDx Women in November, 2022, to talk about couples' dynamics with money (and the shock of having her talk cut down from 2,000 to 300 words to deliver for the event itself, and having to redo the entire talk on the day of the event), and how Meredith, inspired by Dorie Clark's "Becoming a Recognized Expert" course, has leveraged her TEDx talk as "social proof" of her expertise, and further leaned into expanding her network of potential clients through a luncheon series, each meeting connecting 6 women in high-level leadership roles who would meet and talk through a series of 3 simple questions that Meredith provided in order to connect with one another.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Meredith shares how she struggled in knowing how to really run an advisory practice like a business due to a lack of mentors around her (and is now much more mindful of the types of fellow advisor business owners she surrounds herself with), why Meredith still feels like her practice is in a "chasm of potential death" because of the unique challenges that arise in hiring and scaling up an advisory firm as it crosses $1M of revenue (and the staff infrastructure that has to be built to keep growing through that phase), and how, despite Meredith's surprise at how hard running and growing a business still is after 17 years, she's been able to keep growing by trying to constantly evolve, keep improving her process to find and put the right team members into the right roles that the business needs.

So, whether you're interested in learning about how hiring early and having the right recruitment and hiring process in place can mean the difference between the firm surviving despite a surprise brain cancer diagnosis and running out of cash due to years of bad hires, what it's REALLY like to apply, prepare for and give a TED Talk (twice), or how to grow your network and client base through intimate gatherings of influential and inspirational people within your firm's niche, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Meredith Moore.

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (March 16-17)

March 15, 2024 01:03 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 the final version of the Department of Labor’s (DoL) new “Retirement Security Rule” has been sent to the Office of Management for review, with the rule potentially going into effect in early 2025. While the final submitted text has not been released, some experts suggest that the DoL likely made few changes to its initial proposal, despite significant opposition from broker-dealers that could lead to the judicial system deciding the rule’s ultimate fate.

Also in industry news this week:

CFP Board this week announced changes to its Sanctions Guidelines and revisions to its Fitness Standards that clarify the factors that determine how potential sanctions are determined and revise the framework use to determine whether a candidate is eligible to become a CFP certificant
The Financial Services Institute joined other trade groups in filing a complaint against the DoL’s independent contractor rule, arguing that it creates confusion about the status of many financial professionals who prefer to operate as independent contractors

From there, we have several articles on tax planning:

The IRS has launched its free direct filing program, though it is currently limited to taxpayers in certain states and with relatively simple tax situations
Clients looking to rollover unused funds from 529 plans have the opportunity do so for both 2023 and 2024, with the deadline for 2023 fast approaching
President Biden’s budget proposal released this week includes a range of potential tax changes, from raising the top marginal rate to increasing the child tax credit

We also have a number of articles on practice management:

RIA M&A activity appears to have picked up in the first quarter of the year, with a steady flow of interested buyers and sellers
Why integrating tech stacks, service offerings, and team cultures is crucial to the success of an RIA acquisition
How the headline purchase price often does not reflect the final price an RIA buyer pays and the amount the seller receives, highlighting the importance of careful negotiation of deal terms by both sides

We wrap up with 3 final articles, all about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the advisory industry:

How generative AI tools could transform the way knowledge workers, including financial advisors, operate, rather than replace them altogether
How lessons learned from the introduction of the digital spreadsheet can inform advisors’ future use of AI tools
How current advisor-facing software incorporates AI capabilities and why firm-specific tools might become more common in the future

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!

#FA Success Ep 376: Accelerating Growth To 30 Clients/Month With Affordable Advice(-Only) Services Where Clients Can Keep Control, With Eric Simonson

March 12, 2024 07:02 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Financial Advisor Success Podcast

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Welcome back to the 376th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Eric Simonson. Eric is the Founder & CEO of Abundo Wealth, an Advice-Only RIA based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that oversees $600M in assets under advisement for 420 client households.

What's unique about Eric, though, is that Abundo has grown its base of 420 clients, and is on pace for well over $1M of revenue in 2024, despite having launched barely 4 years ago… with an "advice-only" business model of providing comprehensive financial planning for $189/month and helping clients implement themselves, that has generated so much word-of-mouth that they're now bringing in more than 30 new clients, per month, and staffing up on salaried financial advisors to meet the demand.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Eric allows his clients to maintain control over their investments but to ensure they actually implement has built out guided tutorials of how, exactly, to trade their investments across most of the major brokerage and 401(k) platforms, how Abundo has arranged their team's capacity to balance each advisor's workload and set the metrics for how far in advance of their continued growth they need to hire new advisors in order to avoid advisor burn-out, and how, primarily through referrals coupled with extremely affordable rates to reach a segment of consumers that may not want to relinquish control to a 'traditional' AUM advisor, Abundo is now bringing in almost 30 new client households per month without requiring any business development from their salaried advisors.

We also talk about Eric's journey in trying to find the right fee structure for Abundo, which has evolved from what was originally an income-based fee, to a fixed rate of $89/month for individuals versus $139/month for couples, finally landing on their current $189/month fee (which they determined will still allow enough profit margin to hire the required new team members to sustain their growth), the cadence of 4 meetings in the first year and 3 check-in meetings in subsequent years that Eric has implemented to maintain his client service model, and how Eric has grown to enjoy the entrepreneurial side of building the firm, but struggles with how those requirements are sometimes coupled with a feeling of guilt over not having more time to spend with clients as well as the business grows.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Eric shares how even though the firm has been incredibly successful in growing through referrals and various find-an-advisor directories, he thinks the next big marketing opportunity is to lean into social media (especially video), the way Eric got comfortable being his authentic self and leaning into the niche his firm serves (even if it means figuring out how to build solutions that don't yet exist), and how the opportunity to be an entrepreneur and create something new and different is what carried Eric through the challenging early days of the business where he knew he could get a good salaried advisor job for a much higher income, but instead stuck with Abundo even when he couldn't afford to pay himself a salary, because he was so energized by the vision of what he was building.

So, whether you're interested in learning about how to effectively evolve in the journey of finding the right fee structure for your firm, how to keep your hiring practice far enough ahead of your workload capacity to avoid overwhelming your advisors, how to stay true to your authentic self through keeping a finger on the pulse of your firm's strengths and niches, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Eric Simonson.

How Advisors Can Get Client Referrals By Identifying “Active Promoters”

March 11, 2024 07:04 am 0 Comments CATEGORY: Marketing

Referrals can play a vital role in the growth of financial advisory firms since finding prospective clients via referral requires virtually no hard-dollar costs, and it takes only a fraction of the time needed for other marketing channels like social media, blogging, and seminars. However, finding reliable sources of referrals can sometimes be challenging for advisors: Centers of Influence (COIs) like accountants and attorneys may not be as attuned to the advisor's services as the advisor's clients themselves, yet asking current clients for introductions to people in their networks can be awkward since not all clients are equally receptive to being asked to provide referrals (and clients who aren't inclined to offer referrals can even have a negative reaction to the request, potentially damaging the advisor-client relationship!).

In this guest post, Todd Fithian, co-founder and managing partner of The Legacy Companies LLC, discusses a systematic approach that advisors can take to ask clients for referrals. By first identifying clients who are receptive to the idea and who would most likely be viable referral sources, advisors can focus their efforts on those clients rather than devoting resources to clients who wouldn't want to be approached for a referral in the first place. By designing simple surveys to determine clients' Net Promoter Scores, advisors can divide their clients into groups of those who may be more (and less) likely to want to 'promote' (i.e., refer others to) the advisor. This can help the advisor decide who to ask for a referral and who to avoid the subject with – although for the latter group, scheduling a separate meeting to discuss potential issues that underlie the clients' reluctance may provide valuable insights about both the advisor's processes in general and any relationship concerns the client may have more specifically.

After identifying potential clients who might serve as good "active promoters", advisors can take the next step by asking clients whether they'd be willing to refer people in their networks who might benefit from the advisor's services. One way to do this is to invite the client to a Dedicated Introduction Meeting (DIM) where the advisor and client can review the client's personal or professional networks and pinpoint contacts who might align with the advisor's firm and benefit from working with the advisor. To this end, it's essential to provide the client with guidance by clarifying the advisor's ideal client profile (since prospective clients who align best with the advisor's value proposition will more likely become clients themselves), which will also help clients narrow the list of introductions to contacts who would be a good fit with the advisor.

Ultimately, the key point is that asking for client referrals shouldn't feel like it pushes any boundaries with uncomfortable requests; instead, it should feel more like a natural progression of the authentic relationship built between the advisor and the client. By developing a process centered around respect for the client's willingness to open up their network to the advisor – as well as their trust that the advisor could serve those potential clients well – advisors can make the process feel more natural for clients while effectively bringing in their ideal target prospects!

Weekend Reading For Financial Planners (March 9-10)

March 8, 2024 01:58 pm 0 Comments CATEGORY: Weekend Reading

Enjoy the current installment of “Weekend Reading For Financial Planners” – this week’s edition kicks off with the news that RIA clients of an insurance broker providing Errors & Omissions (E&O) coverage saw a 213% increase in claims paid in 2023, attributed to significant jumps in suitability claims (likely stemming from the 2022 market downturn) and claims related to wire fraud. Which suggests that financial advisory firms could potentially mitigate their potential exposure to future exposures by reviewing asset allocations with clients more frequently (to ensure they understand and approve of the advisor’s recommendations) and by maintaining strong policies and procedures related to client wire transfers (and ensure firm staff is trained on them!) to prevent fraud.

Also in industry news this week:

A recent survey has found that a majority of prospective financial planning clients across all age brackets are open to working with a remote advisor, creating opportunities for advisors to grow their businesses and for clients to find the ‘best’ advisor for their needs, regardless of their location
A federal judge has ruled that the Corporate Transparency Act, which requires small business entities such as LLCs and corporations to report identifying information on their "beneficial owners", is unconstitutional, raising questions about whether businesses (including certain non-exempt financial advisory firms) will be required to comply with its requirements

From there, we have several articles on practice management:

Why many RIAs are experiencing high staff turnover and how a more deliberate approach when hiring could lead to more successful hires
The key behaviors that can help a newly promoted manager succeed, including the need to set and communicate clear goals and the ability to provide regular feedback to team members (without micromanaging)
How firms can avoid wrongful termination lawsuits, from establishing clear policies in employment agreements and employee handbooks to considering whether to offer departing employees a severance package

We also have a number of articles on investment planning:

Why the well-known (and frequently judged) “60/40” portfolio could have a bright future, despite the poor returns it experienced in 2022
While a diversified investment portfolio can offer significant risk-management benefits, it also tends to come with periods of underperformance that can be challenging for investors to withstand
Why U.S. stocks have dominated their international counterparts during the past decade and whether it still makes sense to have exposure to international equities

We wrap up with 3 final articles, all about decision-making:

Why research suggests that individuals make their best financial decisions in their early 50s and how advisors can support clients across the age spectrum based on their unique skills and weak points of view
Why it’s important to recognize that there often is no “Secret Option C” when it comes to make a challenging decision with 2 distinct options, and how advisors are well-positioned to help clients overcome the tendency to put off these tough choices
How a structured framework can help advisors make decisions when a seemingly unlimited number of options are available, from choosing a niche to deciding what to discuss when leveraging content marketing

Enjoy the ‘light’ reading!