Executive Summary
Starting a new firm can be a nerve-wracking time for an entrepreneurially minded financial advisor, as making the jump involves a significant amount of professional and financial risk. Nonetheless, after a year or 2 in business, some firm owners will find that their plate is becoming full and their available time is shrinking as they balance servicing current clients with marketing for new ones and also possibly managing staff. Which presents an opportunity for the firm owner to step back and assess whether they want to change any of the practices that they've established in their first years in business to make the next several years both professionally and personally rewarding.
In this guest post, Jake Northrup, founder of Experience Your Wealth, LLC, discusses 7 lessons he learned in years 3–5 of building his RIA and the changes he subsequently made to his service model, client base, and daily schedule, offering guidance to firm owners who may need to navigate some of the same challenges that come with scaling their advisory business.
When an advisor opens a firm, they might have little to no revenue but a good deal of time to manage their practice. Which means that when their first clients come on board, they might be tempted to overservice them to demonstrate the value that they can provide. Nevertheless, as a client base grows, maintaining such a level of service can take up more time that the advisor may have available, particularly given the added responsibilities of running their growing business. In Jake's case, after deciding that he was overservicing clients during the earlier years of his practice, he started scheduling fewer standard meetings and limited the number of after-meeting action items, freeing up his time and mental bandwidth for other activities to grow and run his firm.
In addition, he also found that he preferred working with certain types of planning clients over others, leading him to refine his niche and ideal client persona over time. While Jake had originally worked with equity compensation clients, current or aspiring business owners, and young professionals with student loans of $100,000 or more, he realized that he didn't care as much for student loan planning, which led him to make the difficult decision to transition 20% of his client base who primarily needed student loan planning.
Jake also learned key lessons on managing daily schedules. For instance, because he disliked the traditional 9–5 work schedule, he offered his team significant flexibility in deciding when they worked. However, this lack of structure actually put more pressure on team members because it didn't allow for sufficient collaboration time, leading him to implement a more standard work schedule that still offered some flexibility during the day and virtual coworking sessions for the team. For himself, Jake time blocked his schedule to ensure that he prioritized his personal life and wellbeing (e.g., taking vacations) and organized his workday to leverage the times of day when he has the most energy. He also conducted a "time audit" based on Dan Martell's 2-dimensional DRIP Matrix system to help him identify tasks based not just on their revenue potential but also their ability to energize and light him up.
Ultimately, the key point is that a new financial advisory firm owner's original vision for their practice is likely to change over time, which can create challenging decision points (e.g., when to hire new staff and whether to adjust the firm's ideal client persona). Nevertheless, as Jake has found, there are strategies to help firm owners mold their business to meet personal and professional needs, which can help them support greater wellbeing for themselves and a more sustainable business in the long run!
Intro – Where We Are Today
I launched Experience Your Wealth, LLC (EYW) in November of 2019 from scratch. No clients or revenue; a completely blank slate. If you're interested in the 7 lessons learned when launching a fee-only RIA from scratch, you can read my previous blog post about it here.
As of July 2024, we have 71 clients with $650,000 of ongoing revenue. Our typical client is 40 years old with a $400,000+ household income, has a $1,000,000+ net worth, and typically has equity compensation and/or owns a small business. Our minimum annual fee is $10,000 and scales up to $30,000. We have a team of 3: me as the lead planner, a paraplanner, and a fractional financial therapist.
Sounds like the plan all along, right? Not even close. A year ago, we had a team of 4 full-time employees, 90 ongoing clients, and aspirations to reach 150 ongoing clients by 2027. We were growing very fast and doing great work for clients, but I was moving at a pace that was simply not sustainable. After 'sprinting' in my professional life since starting EYW in 2019, I needed some time to slow down and 'walk'.
What followed was a series of difficult but necessary pivots. I let go of a team member that I didn't feel was the best fit for EYW. We changed our service model. We narrowed our niche, raised our fees, and transitioned clients to different firms. I established healthier boundaries and structures within EYW. These decisions were all scary and painful to make, but with the help of my business coach, life coach, mastermind peers, and my spouse, I knew they were necessary for EYW and me to thrive, not just strive.
For those who may be in year 3+ of their business and looking to scale their growth, I wanted to share my story – the successes, failures, fears, and aspirations – with hopes that it can normalize your experience and prompt questions and ideas for how you can scale your business in a way that is aligned with your values and goals. Here are the 7 main lessons that I've learned in years 3–5 of building my fee-only RIA.
Lesson 1: Service Your Early Clients As If You Already Had 40
As a new business owner, it's normal to feel vulnerable and insecure. You publicly announce to the world that you're starting a new business… but what if nobody wants to work with you? Imposter syndrome is a real thing, especially as you get started.
I felt this (and still do, to a certain extent) in the early days of EYW. The irony is that I knew how to be a financial planner when I launched EYW – I had a handful of professional certifications, I had 5+ years of experience leading high-net-worth-client engagements, I made mistakes and learned from them, I knew what questions to ask, etc. While I will still learn and improve as a financial planner, I felt like I had at least a very solid baseline and experience when starting EYW. And yet, I still completely overserved my early clients out of my own insecurity.
When you're just starting your firm and have very few clients, it can be easy to fall into the trap of overservicing clients, especially when you have plenty of free time. For example, here are some things I did with the initial clients that I wouldn't have done if we had 40 clients:
- Scheduled too many standard meetings
- Helped track and monitor spending
- Identified too many action items after meetings and tried to implement them too quickly
- Provided too many follow-up tasks to help clients implement action items
In other words, I felt like I was being too proactive. As a result, this led to perceived capacity constraints too early. I set too fast of a pace upfront for my team and my clients, which mainly stemmed from my insecurity versus what the clients actually wanted. Therefore, we started to make some changes that positively impacted us and our clients, such as the following:
- Scheduling fewer standard meetings so we had more time and space to see clients when they actually needed to meet
- Helping clients identify no more than 2–3 high-impact action items after meetings
- Focusing our follow-up on the highest-impact action items
- Letting go of the smaller things that don't need to be perfect
Overservicing clients can run the risk of creating an unhealthy client-planner relationship where clients are overly dependent on the advisor and/or are being moved through their process at too fast of a pace. In hindsight, I wish I had asked myself the following questions early on:
- Would this level of service be sustainable if I had 40 clients?
- Is the client asking for this service, or am I doing it out of insecurity?
- Am I trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
- Am I trying to implement at a pace that is realistic for the client?
- What are the 2–3 highest-impact items to focus on that should take up 80% of our time and effort?
Lesson learned: Ongoing client care is a mix of high-impact, proactive touchpoints as well as quick, reactive care. This reframing of how I viewed our value to clients was hugely impactful and gave me the confidence to convince myself that I don't need to rush to fill space or add work when things are slower or are in a steady state with clients.
Simply being present and available for our clients when they need us is hugely valuable and part of our duty to our clients. Clients aren't thinking about us as much as we think they are.
Lesson 2: Your Client Service Process Will Likely Need To Evolve
When you are just launching your RIA, you are making a series of educated guesses for the business – what clients to serve, how you will service clients, your desired tech stack, etc. While this is very valuable, you also want to be ready to tear it up and pivot at any moment as your business starts to scale and evolve. Frankly, it's unlikely that your client service process in years 1–3 will be the same as years 4–5, and that's not a bad thing.
When I launched EYW, I was fascinated by the concept of surge meetings. I had heard of the success stories from many other advisors who used them. The idea of batching all meeting prep, meetings, and follow-up together sounded great. For years 1–3, we had 3 standard meetings with clients per year – meeting 1 occurred in February and March, meeting 2 occurred in June, and meeting 3 occurred in October and November. Each meeting had a standardized list of topics (which were then customized to the client), and it seemed to work really well for us. Except for when we reached 60 clients.
In June 2023, I had 60 client meetings – roughly 15 client meetings per week, or 3 per day. Not only was I burnt out at the end of the month, but I felt like I wasn't as present and attentive as I wanted to be during those meetings. EYW has a heavy focus on life planning and the emotions and psychology behind money, which requires me to feel rested, present, and focused.
In addition, our team (and I specifically) lacked spaciousness during surge months. Spaciousness not only for ourselves when life stuff happened, but also for our clients when things popped up and they needed us most. Since our average client age is 40, many of them were buying homes, changing jobs, having babies, starting businesses, having equity liquidation events, etc., and it was overwhelming to properly service them during surge months.
Therefore, we pivoted to having 2 standard meetings (instead of 3) per year, with the first meeting occurring from January to May and the second meeting occurring from September to December. We structure our meeting months so that every Monday is free from client meetings to let the team spend time on meeting prep, and we have a maximum of 2 meetings per day Tuesday–Thursday and a maximum of 1 meeting per day on Friday. In addition, we now leave the last week of each month free for client reschedules, high-impact ad-hoc client meetings that pop up, meeting prep, action item follow-up, etc.
This type of change initially sparked some insecurity in me – what will clients think if we have fewer meetings with them? Will they perceive less value? How will we communicate this to them?
However, with the reframe of how I view our value discussed in Lesson 1, I decided not to make a big deal out of this. I didn't make a big announcement or justify why we were doing it. To my pleasant surprise, only a handful of clients asked questions when we scheduled our next standard meeting 6 months in advance versus 4 months in advance and, after a quick explanation that we would still be available to schedule a meeting ad-hoc if things popped up, they were completely fine with it.
Lesson learned: The number of meetings doesn't equal value… value equals value. I allowed (and encouraged) myself to pivot our client service process as we began to scale. Changes to the client service process may seem scary for advisors, but it's unlikely that clients will really care as long as their perceived value of the relationship doesn't change. The change to our client meeting process allowed us to show up better for clients, have more spaciousness, and deliver far greater value. If we hadn't made this pivot, our client service would have suffered.
Lesson 3: Your Business Will Tell You What Business You Are In
When speaking with my business coach, she said something to me that really stuck: "Your business will tell you what business you are in". This framing was so powerful because it reinforced that my business has its own life, needs, and attention – and that this will change over time. The business you envisioned in the first few years may not be the same business you have in the next few years – and that's okay!
For EYW, this manifested in the clientele we were serving. I defined our niche early on as travel-loving young families who don't buy into the traditional '"9–5, work-until-you're-65". I then added qualifying criteria that included household income greater than $200,000 and an underlying planning need for 1) equity compensation, 2) student loans of $100,000 or more, and/or 3) current or aspiring business owners.
Going into 2024, We had 88 clients at $669,000 of ongoing revenue. I classified each client as either high net worth (defined internally as >$2 million net worth), equity compensation, business owners, or student loans/other so we could see the breakdown of clients. Many of our clients with >$2 million net worth also had equity compensation or owned a business, but we still classified them as high net worth for this exercise.
I noticed 2 primary shifts that started to emerge as we entered 2024. First, the new clients coming in had higher net worth (and therefore, had higher fees) with more technical and emotional complexity. These clients often had equity compensation and/or were business owners, which led us to deepen our expertise in these areas. Second, I found that I simply didn't like the planning involved in student loans nearly as much as I enjoyed the planning with my other clients. It was very difficult to stay on top of the ever-changing student loan rules, and it wasn't very economical to serve this clientele when we reflected on time spent versus the revenue received by this client segment. In addition, our student loan-focused clients made up about 18% of our clients but only 12% of our ongoing revenue.
Therefore, we made the very difficult decision to transition nearly 20% of our client base, primarily the student loan-focused clients, to different financial planning firms. In addition to not enjoying the student loan planning, our new minimum annual fee was $7,500 at the time, and I didn't feel like those clients could comfortably absorb the added cost without jeopardizing their other goals. We had very close relationships with these clients (and a handful were some of our earliest clients), so we wanted to approach this transition in a way that we felt best supported them while also protecting our business and my time.
The process to transition our clients required the following 3 steps, described in detail below:
- Determine if I wanted to sell the clients to another firm or transition them for free;
- Vet firms that could be a good fit for the clients; and
- Notify the clients and communicate with the transition firm.
Step 1: Deciding how to make the switch. We were actually working with FP Transitions at the time for my death/disability succession plan, and they floated the idea of selling a portion of our clients. This thought never really crossed my mind, but they thought there would be plenty of buyers that would be interested, and the purchase price would be between 2–3X the ongoing revenue (roughly $180,000–$270,000). While this was enticing, I felt like it would limit the options for firms (especially given the student loan specialization required) and that it would also require a lot more of my time and involvement compared to transitioning for free. Therefore, I decided to transition our clients to a new firm for free.
Step 2: Vet suitable firms for transitioning clients. To help facilitate the transition for my clients, I wanted to provide them with a few options for firms that work with clients in a similar way and have a specialty in student loans. Given how difficult it can be for a client to find a financial planning firm, I felt this was better for them versus recommending one of the generic find-an-advisor portals. I created a Google Form with a subset of vetting questions and then posted it in the XYPN Facebook group to find firms that were interested, along with some context about my clientele (age, income, net worth, planning needs, etc.). I received interest from 26 firms and narrowed it down to 3 who I felt were best suited for my clients after reviewing their website and target clientele. Although every firm will service clients in a different way, I wanted to find firms that had a focus on a client's life and values as well as a clear expertise in student loan planning to help improve the chances of a client receiving a similar client experience at a different firm.
Step 3: Notify the clients. Then came the hard part… how do I actually tell clients? Luckily, we already had our meetings scheduled with clients (between February and May), so I decided to wait until we had the meeting to notify them. We prepared for the meeting as usual, created an agenda, and then let them know via email a day prior to the meeting that we would be transitioning them out of EYW.
Here's an example of the language we added to their email:
I also wanted to share some difficult news ahead of our meeting. As we continue to refine our business model and services, we've made the hard decision to shift away from working with clients who have a heavy focus on student loan planning. This will reduce the number of clients we work with to better match our team's current capacity.
Because of this, we feel that EYW is no longer the best fit for you, and we will be ending our relationship by the end of next month (or sooner if you'd prefer). We are so, so grateful for our relationship up to this point and feel proud of the progress we made together.
If you are interested in continuing to work with a financial planner, we can provide recommendations for 3 new firms that could be a better potential fit for you going forward.
We'll be ready to proceed with our meeting and agenda tomorrow as planned, but we wanted to give you sufficient time to digest this information – we'll take your lead on what would be most valuable to cover tomorrow.
Although the anticipation leading up to the meeting conversations was the hardest part, I was pleasantly surprised when clients were understanding and supportive of the decision. They appreciated that we gave them time to off-ramp (roughly 6–8 weeks) if they wanted to stay with us for the near future and that we would provide a list of firms for them to reach out to.
Lesson learned: Our target client in the beginning years wasn't the target client we wanted to service as we began scaling… and that was okay. We wanted space and flexibility to pivot our clientele as we grew. Making the decision to transition clients out of the firm was really difficult, but the cost of not doing so would have been far greater in the long run.
Lesson 4: Grow At A Pace Where You'll Still Be Happy If You Don't Meet That Pace
After struggling to find your initial clients early on, it can be really difficult to avoid the trap of growing too fast as you scale the growth of your firm. There will likely be a time when your prospect pipeline fills up quickly from client referrals, long-term marketing efforts begin to pay off, and your reputation has a solid footing.
After growing much faster than I anticipated in the first 2 years, I made the strategic decision to hire 'early' in order to support future growth. While I love being a financial planner, I realized I also love being a CEO. I wanted to spend more time on the company vision, strategic planning, and high-impact client work, as opposed to the various other components of ongoing client care, such as meeting prep, follow-up, answering ad-hoc questions, etc. Therefore, I decided to build out a team early so that new clients coming in would be accustomed to a team-based approach for their ongoing client service from the start as opposed to the early clients that were used to working with just me.
In making these early hires, I was sacrificing company profit and my pay, which was a tradeoff my wife and I felt comfortable making at the time with the hope that it could lead me to my desired role within EYW faster, with financial security to come later. This also required us to make lofty new client goals and grow at a fast pace to compensate for the extra salaries I added to the firm. And while we did actually meet those new client goals, the pace was simply unsustainable. Along the way, we experienced many bumps, such as the following:
- A team member's medical event that led to no/reduced work capacity for an extended period of time.
- A lack of spaciousness and time for collaboration and training.
- My own feeling of being stretched far too thin – I was working weekends, spending time in too many meetings, and facing an unsustainable workload.
- Firing of a team member who I felt wasn't the right fit for our team.
I also built a greater appreciation of the emotional and technical learning curve required to service our clients the way that made us special. It's not easy for a financial planner to understand and incorporate financial therapeutic skills while also understanding the ins and outs of equity compensation, for example. This mix of emotional and technical expertise required more training and coaching than I had the time and mental energy to provide.
However, EYW is now in a place where we are growing at a slower, more sustainable pace. We have a goal to take on 10 new, higher-fee clients, but we're also completely fine if we don't hit that goal.
Lesson learned: While I'm grateful for the learnings and where we are today, I wouldn't make the same financial planner hires as early as I did if I were to do it over again. I would have given more time for clients to transition from onboarding to our ongoing client-care cycle when the time to service clients typically goes down. I would have built sufficient emergency reserves in the business, ensured sufficient profitability, and paid myself enough before making the financial planner hires. I would have fully evaluated the changes I mentioned in lessons 1–3 first to free up my capacity.
Lesson 5: Flexible-ish Structure May Be Needed When Managing A Remote Team
EYW has been, and will likely always be, a completely remote company. This has provided huge benefits such as lower fixed operating expenses, flexibility, and the ability to attract team members from all over the country. One of the main reasons I started EYW was because I craved the autonomy to control my time – the ability to work when I wanted, where I wanted, and with whom I wanted was invaluable. I strongly dislike the typical 9–5 corporate structure and have always felt that as long as work is done and results are delivered, it shouldn't matter when I was working. However, I'm hardwired as an entrepreneur, and not all people are (or should be!) hardwired the same way.
When I started growing my team, I offered unlimited paid time off, no standard working hours, and tons of flexibility to accommodate life stuff as long as work was getting done and clients were happy. At one point, we had 4 team members spread across 3 different time zones, and everyone was working different hours with a few pockets of shared time, such as our standard weekly team meeting, 1-on-1s with me, and client meetings. This type of environment worked best for me, but not the rest of my team. In other words, I didn't put any guardrails in place.
I quickly learned that a lack of structure can actually put more pressure on team members, especially when they are hardwired to seek structure. The absence of standard working hours, clear and tangible definitions of success, and sufficient collaboration time can lead to a lot of stress. Especially in a remote environment, people can feel isolated and unsupported. This lack of structure made it difficult for team members to be clear about meeting expectations; the mental energy required to plan out and prioritize their day also took energy away from other priorities.
Therefore, we pivoted going into 2024 and found a much healthier middle ground between the typical corporate America structure and no structure. We implemented a generous paid-time-off policy that included 4 weeks of vacation with added time off around standard holidays and the last week of the year off. We implemented standard working hours with some flexibility to accommodate various life stuff that pops up during the day. I put far more structure and metrics around what 'success' looks like for each position. We started conducting more virtual coworking sessions where we join a Zoom call, go off video, and mute ourselves as we work on individual tasks but can quickly unmute to ask a question. This essentially replicated the in-person collaboration of working together in an office.
Most importantly, I overcame my limiting belief that I had to change how I myself worked in order to replicate how my team needed to work. In other words, I was initially telling myself that I had to put some guardrails around myself because I put some guardrails in place for my team – and this is something I wanted to avoid when starting my firm. For example, I feared cornering myself back into the 9–5 corporate structure I disliked, and felt like I was losing the ability to work at times that best matched my energy and personal schedule (e.g., having the option to take a Wednesday afternoon off and work on Saturday morning).
However, I eventually overcame my insecurities surrounding this and gave myself permission as the founder to operate in a slightly different manner than my team – and that I wasn't 'bad' for doing this. In fact, I am required to work in a different way in order to show up as I need to for the company, my team, and my clients.
Lesson learned: Flexible-ish structure is likely needed, especially in the earlier days of hiring team members. The lack of guardrails can actually do more harm than good, and as time goes on, you can expand the guardrails as appropriate. Most importantly, it's okay for the founder to operate in a different way from the rest of their team.
Lesson 6: Time Block Your Professional And Personal Priorities
As you are scaling, it's very easy for your calendar to quickly get away from you. You are likely juggling several responsibilities – managing a team, prospects, existing client service, marketing, etc. This often involves a huge variety in the types of work you are doing, which can lead to a lot of task-switching. It also means you will likely have a never-ending to-do list. And that means that it can be very easy to overwork, not take care of yourself, and let your business run you, as opposed to you running your business.
I felt this way going into 2024. I made a significant number of changes that would take time to settle in and free up capacity. Therefore, I knew that I had to be proactive versus reactive with my time, which I solved by following 3 steps, as discussed below.
Step 1: Identify and prioritize your ideal day, week, and year. This is an invaluable exercise to go through because it can act as a grounding mechanism that everything else has to work around. You can ask yourself questions such as the following:
- How many hours are you working?
- When are you taking vacation?
- When are you spending time with family?
- When are you spending time on self-care?
I decided to schedule everything that I wanted (and needed) personally so that I could properly show up professionally. I scheduled things such as time off, daily blocks for exercise, date night with my wife each week, family time, hobbies, reading, etc. I knew that seeing these events in my calendar would keep me accountable and make me prioritize my professional time in a healthier way. It also made it easier to say "no" and to delegate certain tasks that would jeopardize this time.
Step 2: Identify your green, yellow, and red energy zones. In the book At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor by Carey Nieuwhof, Carey talks about how readers can bucket their time and energy into 3 zones – green, yellow, and red zones. The green zone represents the times when a person is at their best – it's their peak energy and productivity periods in the day. Your red zone is when they have low energy and it's hard to produce any meaningful work. The yellow zone is the middle ground – it's not the person's best or their worst.
I went through the exercise and identified my zones as:
- Green zone: First 3 hours of the working day (8 am – 11 am) and the first hour after working out and walking my dog (3 pm).
- Yellow zone: 2 hours before my mid-day break (11 am – 1 pm) and then 1 hour after my afternoon Green Zone (4 pm). This is the optimal time for shallower yet important work, such as team meetings, meeting follow-up, etc.
- Red zone: 1 pm – 3 pm (my mid-day workout and break) and after 5 pm. This is the optimal time for the lowest-impact work, such as email, admin work, etc.
While every day will ebb and flow (and life stuff will always pop up, too, especially for those with kids), I wanted my 'standard' day to look something like this:
This helped me better match my energy levels to the type of work that I was performing.
Step 3: Complete a time audit and DRIP Matrix. In the book Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, Dan talks about how entrepreneurs can reframe their view of time. We often fall into a limiting belief that the more work we do, the more productive our business will become. In other words, we falsely believe that more input equals more output.
In reality, though, scaling your business will likely mean that you are doing less work but that the work you are doing is what you are uniquely gifted to do – your zone of genius. It will require that you let go of other responsibilities that either don't give you energy or don't make you money/carry high financial weight. Dan offers an exercise in his book that involves creating a "DRIP Matrix", which helps readers organize their activities across 2 dimensions – how much money a task makes, and how much a task energizes or lights them up – and categorizing each into 1 of 4 quadrants: Delegation (low revenue, low energy), Replacement (high revenue, low energy), Investment (low revenue, high energy), and Production (high revenue, high energy).
This framework helped me develop my own DRIP Matrix where I was able to consider all of the various tasks I was doing and assign them to a certain quadrant; it also offered me a new perspective on how I was spending my time.
In creating my own DRIP Matrix, it was clear that I wasn't properly prioritizing the activities in my "Production" quadrant, so I created time blocks each month for things such as marketing, mini-CEO days to work on strategy, etc. In addition, the items that I placed in the "Delegation" and "Replacement" quadrants reinforced the areas that I needed to delegate, hire, or outsource for. While these items were important for the business, they could be done by other people. In other words, the activities in my Delegation and Replacement quadrants would likely be activities that others would have in their "Production" quadrants.
This exercise led me to crafting a 12-month plan with my paraplanner to take over more tasks, as well as hiring outside firms to take over my compliance and cybersecurity needs. While I will still maintain items in the "Replacement" quadrant for the near future, the DRIP Matrix has helped me identify that I will likely benefit from hiring a financial planner in the future to take over those high-revenue responsibilities that just don't energize me when the business is ready for it.
Lesson learned: Time is your most valuable asset as a firm owner. In the first few years, the majority of my time was spent finding and servicing my early clients. As I entered the scaling phase, it was very easy to spread myself too thin as I juggled the various demands of the business. However, proactively scheduling out my time and priorities helped me ensure that I was allocating sufficient time to spend on myself and my family, work on and in the business, and, at the same time, match the type of work I was doing to the energy level that requires it. It can be helpful you to periodically conduct your own time audit by creating a DRIP Matrix to see whether you are happy with the time spent in the areas that make up your "Production" and "Investment" quadrants and reflect how you can offload the tasks in your "Delegation" and "Replacement" quadrants.
Lesson 7: The Reward Is Worth It
As you navigate the inevitable growing pains of scaling an RIA, the reward on the other side will be worth it. I can confidently say that EYW has never been in a better spot than it is today. We have a healthier number of clients and are planning to grow at a slower pace, prioritizing quality over quantity. Our current fees are more representative of the work we're providing to clients. We have more spaciousness in our calendars and feel more present with clients. We have healthier boundaries with our clients and our team. We've added an in-house financial therapist to dive deeper into the human and psychological side of money.
After taking a massive step back financially, I'm now at the point where I'm earning 'enough' so that the decisions I make are meant to support company and personal values, as opposed to strictly growing revenue. And notably, I'm working 20% fewer hours compared to the prior 2 years.
Lesson learned: Getting to this point required implementing a series of challenging, but necessary pivots that involved a lot of introspection, hard conversations with team members and clients, re-establishment of boundaries, and more. Owning my business has been a constant process of making educated guesses, experimenting, reflecting, and rediscovering what I and my business both need. Not everyone is (or should be) hardwired as a business owner, but for those who are, being ready for a fun, challenging, and vulnerable journey will help you face the curveballs that will be constantly thrown at you!
