Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 483rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Erin Botsford. Erin is the founder of The Advisor Authority, a coaching platform that trains advisors on attracting more (and wealthier) clients while also scaling their businesses by building a successful team around them.
What's unique about Erin, though, is how, over the course of her career as an advisory firm owner herself, she developed what she calls the "approach talk" method to closing affluent clients in the first meeting by focusing on risk management exposures that create urgency to act.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Erin's "approach talk" method centers largely on making prospects aware of (up to) 26 risk management exposures (including potential estate planning and insurance items) they face that can create a strong incentive to act (though it often only takes reviewing two or three of them to get prospects to want to become clients), why Erin thinks it's important to meet with both members of a prospect couple (and to recognize that different factors that might spur each of them to want to take action), and how Erin, before entering the room for a prospect meeting, showed them a "founders video" that introduced her and her story to the prospects efficiently (removing the temptation for her to talk extensively about herself during the meeting itself).
We also talk about how Erin used a fee structure that includes both a flat planning fee (to orchestrate implementation of the risk management plan) and an AUM fee on the client's assets (to compensate for the advisor's work managing their portfolio and the risk exposures they take in doing so), how Erin finds that advisors often need to quote a higher planning fee than they might expect when meeting with a high-net-worth prospect (as doing so will help the prospect associate the advisor with the attorneys and other highly paid professionals they already work with), and how Erin found that while some prospects might have initially resisted moving all of their investible assets to her firm from their current advisor, they typically eventually would once they understood that she was raising planning issues that their current advisor never addressed (and would therefore likely provide a deeper level of service in the process).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Erin shares why it's important for founders to be able to eventually remove themselves from every client case in their firm (both to better scale and to ultimately increase the value of their business), why Erin encourages founders to think about what they want their last day in the business to look like and then work backwards to inform how to structure their firm today, and how working as an advisor coach has ultimately allowed Erin to give back to the profession and expand her own philanthropic goals.
So, whether you're interested in learning about a process to close more clients in the first meeting, using a fee structure that combines a flat planning fee with an asset-based fee, or how founders can effectively remove themselves from every client case as their firm grows, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Erin Botsford.
