Building A ‘Killer’ Scorecard To Track Key Weekly Metrics On The Path To $275M AUM: #FASuccess Ep 506 With Jenna Biancavilla

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Resources Featured In This Episode:

• Jenna Biancavilla: LinkedIn
• Pearl Capital Management
• Jenna's Scorecard
• Strategic Coach
• EOS
• "Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business" by Gino Wickman
• "What the Heck Is EOS?" by Gino Wickman
• Svvy

Full Transcript:

Michael: Welcome, Jenna Biancavilla, to the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Jenna: Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael: I'm really excited to have you with us today and to get to nerd out a bit on, I just think of it as good old-fashioned KPIs, key performance indicators, the metrics we actually use and track to monitor the health of our advisory businesses. Not just in the long run, but week to week, month to month, as we're running the business. Because I see this trend in the industry, I feel like 20 years ago, the hot thing was Dan Sullivan, the Strategic Coach that just started coming through and teaching founders all these new ways to run and manage their businesses better, and it caught fire then and still, and a lot of folks today who continue to do coaching, super good experiences with coaches.

More recently, I'm watching EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, now become a popular thing in the advisor world. And one of the unique parts of EOS is it has a strong view that all businesses need to have data that they track on an ongoing basis, all the way down to a weekly scorecard. And then I see a lot of advisors really struggle with, yeah, but what do you actually track on a week-to-week basis in your advisory business?

And I know, Jenna, you've been living this journey as you've grown quickly over the past couple of years, and lots of team members, where there's now a lot of people to keep track of, and what are they doing, are they being productive as the business is moving forward? Which I find is really where metrics and KPIs and the like start to matter. And Jenna, so I'm excited today to get to nerd out on what metrics you actually track and monitor to manage a growing advisory business.

The Value Of Tracking KPIs To Keep Team Members Focused On Firm Growth [04:21]

Jenna: Well, it's a good question, and the answer is it's been a work in progress. I started as an advisor in the broker-dealer land, and I was responsible for my own book, and everything was in my head, and so I knew if I called and followed up with the prospects or not, and that was enough for me. So I didn't start out having great tracking because I kept the information in my head.

But to your point, as I started growing a team and there are other advisors that need to be coached or even other admin team that need to be held accountable for the things that actually drive the business forward, we started putting together our weekly meetings and tracking what made sense to actually hit the KPIs. So obviously, growing AUM, closing new households is one of the bigger goals, but what are some of the leading indicators of the actions necessary to get to that bigger goal?

And so it might just be sending referrals back and forth with some of our COIs or just tracking how many referrals are you sending to COIs versus receiving for COIs, and watching that ratio and seeing when we're not sending as many referrals, how often are the referrals we're receiving falling off? Or something as much as how qualified prospect meetings versus unqualified, what is our close ratio of those qualified prospect meetings, and just having all of that data and looking at it from a weekly basis. And the way EOS works is if you're looking at it and talking about it and reporting on it weekly, you can catch things that look like they're falling off track in the moment instead of waiting till the end of the quarter.

Michael: So you had a lot of cool stuff there. So I will reflect back. Okay, I felt a similar dynamic in my growth journey with businesses over the years that when we're running solo or maybe a little bit further than solo, like it's me and maybe one or two team members that support me, it can still be helpful to have some metrics to just keep track of overall...are we progressing towards our growth goals or our business goals? But everything in the business, either I was present for it or the person who did it reports directly to me on my clients that we're directly involved with on a day-to-day basis.

And I just don't find as much pressure for a lot of detailed metrics because I don't really need metrics to stay in the loop on what's happening in the business because I'm present for everything that's happening in the business. It's me, my clients, and the people who report directly to me.

And once the business gets just even one step larger than that and things start happening for clients when you're not in the room or business activity starts happening and you're not in the room or there's a couple of clients that might interact with an advisor that's not you, all this metric stuff starts to kick in and matter because now suddenly... I hear this a lot for advisors as they make that transition. Suddenly, it feels like you're running blind in a big part of the business because I used to be there for all the things, and now there's enough team members that there's things that happen and I'm not present for them. And now I'm not sure what's going on in my own business anymore. And that losing touch feeling can get a little scary sometimes.

Jenna: It can get scary. And if you don't have the ability for people to report back or even just reach out and ask questions, you're going to lose that quality control over the business because people are not going to be doing things the way that you built it to be done.

But what I learned and found interesting was the EOS book tells you that you really don't need all of this until you've reached about ten team members. I actually implemented it when we were around four to five team members. So way too early than what the book said. But for an advisory business, I have to say it was life-changing for us, and I wish I would have even implemented it sooner.

And even with a solo advisor and a couple of support staff, I could make and argue a case why being able to track things is so important. Even something as simple as everyone being acutely aware of the new assets coming in and maybe a comp structure where everyone gets a little bonus for every extra million dollars that comes in. If everyone sees it and is reporting on it every single week, your support staff's effort and energy to drive forward what actually matters to the bottom line completely changes because they know what the goal is. If you don't set the goal and tell them what to track for and show them the numbers of where we're going, it changes everyone's efforts. So I've seen support staff actually change their behaviors just by using a scorecard.

Michael: Because once the numbers are right there in front of everyone, we just get a little more focused on the numbers that matter because they're right there being reported out. So I know where I stand. I know what I'm doing. I know how I can influence it.

Jenna: Well, and it's so easy for support staff to have a focus on the client, on the support of the client, on their cashiering request, on things that are their day-to-day and not realize what the bigger picture of how do we drive revenue is because they don't see that every single day unless you put it in front of them.

How Jenna Implements EOS In Her Practice [10:29]

Michael: So for those who aren't familiar, you said you have gone down this EOS path. Can you explain what EOS is for those who are not familiar at this point?

Jenna: So the acronym stands for the Entrepreneurial Operating System. And they've done a great job at putting out a series of books that you can read in every different format, whether you're reading "Traction" or "What the Heck Is EOS?" or whichever way you want to consume how to build out an operating system with this strategy. And so that is part of our new hire process, is we hand them the book or the audiobook, "What the Heck Is EOS?" so they know what they're walking into.

And I would say the first game-changer wasn't actually just the scorecard and the KPIs and the tracking. It was how we ran our weekly meeting. And then we had to implement the quarterly meeting. We were not doing a big overhaul quarterly meeting as a team. I, as the founder, was sitting down and thinking about where I wanted the business to go, but I wasn't doing a great job at pulling the whole team into those conversations so that we were all rowing in the right direction or the same direction.

And so something as simple as everyone having the same structure and conversation on the first thing we do in the meeting is we go through our scorecard, and we go through our rocks, which we'll have to talk about what rocks are. And we report on how are we tracking to get our weekly metrics done, our quarterly metrics done. And then anything that comes up of "I am not on track to hit my AUM goal," someone can say, "Let's move that to IDS." So anything that's a really big issue that needs to be talked about, it moves down to the bottom of the meeting, which IDS stands for identify, discuss, solve.

And so then you go through those deeper conversations intentionally at the end of the meeting. And we even prioritize what order should we talk about these things. And so instead of what used to happen, your meetings get derailed because someone wants to talk about how the marketing is going, it all gets very cleanly organized. And the whole team read the book. And so when someone goes off on a tangent, we actually put these little squirrels around our conference room. And someone actually squeaks the squirrel and says, "Squirrel, that needs to go to IDS." And so it keeps the meeting on track. So just that structure has been life-changing for us.

Michael: So I'm trying to process through this for people who have not done this and gone down this road before. So what changed in weekly meetings? What was so different in this structure versus...? Most advisory firms, once they get to the level that there is a team, we have some team meeting, which is usually something to the effect of what happened last week with clients, what's coming up this week with clients. And what you're describing sounds different.

So can you explain more? It's like what shifted? What was different?

Jenna: It's structure and accountability. So we still did a weekly meeting in the past. But one tangible example is we had a running projects list. And so, for example, we wanted to explore back in the day if Holistiplan was a good technology that we should implement into our practice. And so doing the demo, and getting the pricing, and exploring whether or not we should implement it or not went onto the projects list. And I had this never-ending projects list that every once in a while, when we were outside of surge season, I would say, "Who wants to pick up a project and run with it?"

Now the dynamic and structure has changed where that whole projects list is actually potential rocks list. And the thought process behind rocks that they will share in the EOS book is if you're filling a jar with sand, which is the day-to-day client servicing, and then the pebbles, which are the bigger prospect meetings, then by the time you put rocks in the jar, which might be an overhaul of the practice management or just something that's going to really work on the business and move the business forward, you don't have space for it. But if you put the rocks in first, then everything fits. So that's why they use this word rocks in EOS. And so that is what I used to call projects. Now we call them rocks.

And so something like we wanted to overhaul our client segmentation spreadsheet. And we wanted to really not just segment clients based on assets under management, but also are they referring? Do they have a future inheritance? Do they actually take advice? Do we like working with them? And so we wanted to overhaul our client segmentation, but that was a big project. That goes on to the rocks ideas. Then we do our quarterly meeting, and we decide which rocks are the top priority that we really want to accomplish this quarter, and they get assigned to someone. So one person is in charge of accomplishing that rock that quarter.

And so it went from this very unstructured projects list that sometimes got handed out to people and rarely got prioritized to very structured way of handling things that actually move the business forward. So we're doing a lot more work working on the business because of the structure of EOS.

Michael: Interesting. It sounds true to the spirit of rocks, pick the few big things you want to put in the jar first to make sure you've got room for them, whatever it is that moves the business forward. The structure of we're not going to have an ongoing projects list. We're going to have a rocks list, I guess, a potential future projects list, and we're going to be really intentional every quarter to say, "Which one are we going to pull off the shelf this quarter and actually work on, and who's going to drive it and be responsible for it this quarter, so we know who to look at if it doesn't get done?" That was the shift, the "We're going to get clearer on fewer things in a process to pick the thing to make sure it's the right thing with a clear assignment of who's driving the thing forward."

Jenna: And the thing, the rock, gets reported on weekly in the weekly meeting. And so if someone is hitting a roadblock, then it is discussed and solved as a team that week. And we're not waiting to the end of the quarter to realize that important thing to drive the business forward actually got neglected. So it's the structure of the quarterly rocks get reported on weekly that really helps us continue to work on the business every single week.

Michael: And so that's, I guess, again, part of what was helpful for you in the weekly meeting structure, is that one of the parts of the weekly meeting structure is let's check in on how we're doing on our quarterly projects, our quarterly rocks. So there is always a check-in of what's going on. We don't get to the end of the quarter, and someone says, "Oh, yeah, I've been stuck on that for the past month or two because that would have surfaced in a weekly meeting seven weeks ago.

Jenna: Which is spectacular. We are accomplishing so much more because of the structure of the weekly check-ins.

How Establishing Quarterly "Rocks" Helps Get Major Projects To The Finish Line [18:47]

Michael: So can you give some examples in your world? What are rocks? What literally are projects that turned into rocks that someone took on in a quarter and did the thing?

Jenna: So we have defined certain tasks, certain ongoing things that are very important to focus on as petrified rocks. That was a Pearl Capital Management special. Anyone can borrow, petrified rocks if they want to. But this is just something that's going to be perpetually a focus area for someone, and we don't want it to be lost in the spirit of working on these other projects.

So, for example, every single one of our advisors has a petrified rock of AUM. So being able to report back on AUM, yes, it's in the scorecard. Yes, it's in the rocks. And yes, if someone is falling behind on their AUM goal for that quarter and they're not tracking, it will be discussed in the weekly meeting because that is one of the rocks that's always reported on.

But there's also things, like we celebrated our ten-year anniversary back in March of this year, and that was on me. I didn't want to put that on the team, so I said, "I'll plan the party." And also, I planned a pretty bougie party, so I didn't think my team would feel comfortable spending that money. So that was one of my rocks for Q1 of this year, was plan the ten-year party. And it can be something like studying for a new designation and just making sure someone sets a goal and is tracking and hitting their study hours to get to that goal to take the test in time. Or it could be implementing new technology. So someone would own going through all the demos, going through all the implementation, getting all the integration set up, and then training the team on what they learned so that we have a really good launch of a new tech that we add. So it can be anything and everything that we define as important enough to be a rock for that quarter.

Michael: And how many of these do you pull off the list each quarter to do?

Jenna: So the EOS book, I believe, says you're only supposed to have three to five rocks in any given quarter, or you won't be able to accomplish it. It also says the goal is to achieve all of your KPIs, metrics, and rocks at 80% on a firm level. So there's room for we missed one. My team, as most finance people are, is a team of perfectionists, so they strive for 100%. I have to keep reminding them that 80% is the goal. But we've taken as much as maybe seven or eight in a quarter. And then when we go back and do the quarterly meeting, we have conversations and say, "There's a reason three to five is the standard. Seven felt overwhelming. Let's not do that to ourselves again."

Michael: And so for the team...so how many people are on the team?

Jenna: We currently have seven people on the team. So three are advisors. We have two senior advisors, one lead advisor, and then we have four support staff.

Michael: Okay. So in a world where you got as high as seven or eight rocks for the company, should I be thinking of that as, so on average, everybody had one, or is it not necessarily that distributed?

Jenna: So the rocks are assigned at the individual level. So that would be for one person. So three to five per person. So if you did seven, that would have been, "I took on seven rocks, and then I said I couldn't actually handle that many." So one of the lessons is if it's not assigned to one person, then it's not assigned to anyone. So you would never assign a rock to multiple people.

Michael: Because you need one person to ultimately be accountable for did it get done or not?

Jenna: Exactly.

Michael: Because if there's two people, they each point at the other person. It was the other person's fault.

Jenna: Even our AUM goal, I have...the other senior advisor who's in my office, I have her in charge of the firm AUM goal. And then each individual advisor has their personal AUM goal that rolls up to equal what the firm goal is for each quarter. But she is tasked with reaching out to an advisor who might not be tracking because she's in charge of the firm's goal. And so it all does roll up and equal each other. So there are firm-wide goals that equal individual-level goals in certain instances, like an AUM goal.

Michael: Okay. And in this world of rocks, now that you...because you had your ongoing projects list, now you pull things off the list and turn them into rocks for the quarter. I want to just clarify this. How many things are on the ongoing projects list that are still on the shelf and haven't gotten to yet? Is there a rocks backlog of things you want to get to but couldn't get to yet because we can only take so many each quarter?

Jenna: There is. And it sits there in the Google Sheet agenda that is our weekly meeting. That it's every time we go through that IDS part and we define things that need to be solved for, and this might be something that needs to be assigned as a quarterly rock. So they all get thrown onto this potential projects rocks list. But usually, once we go through that quarterly meeting and we discuss all these things that we had thought were important and we really start prioritizing them, the things that don't make it as a quarterly rock are usually not that important.

Maybe in that one weekly meeting we thought it was important, but when we look at the practice as a whole, and we zoom out for the quarter, that urgency that we felt during that week all of a sudden fell off. And I am absolutely guilty of that. I am such an entrepreneur. I love shiny things. I love coming up with new tech and new ways to change absolutely everything. And so my team's very good at...and EOS gave them the tools to take my entrepreneur chaos and organize it to we will talk about it at the quarterly because no, Jenna, you're not going to derail everything we're working on because you have this shiny object syndrome. So it actually probably organizes me more than anything.

Michael: So I want to make sure...and that's an important point. I want to make sure I understand the flow then. So as the entrepreneur, you can pretty much come up with a new thing to do every single weekly meeting. So you're in a weekly meeting. You have an idea for a thing because of whatever's going on. You say, "Ooh, we could do this," and the team says, "No, no, no, Jenna, we already set our rocks for the quarter. It's these things. We can totally take that idea you just had and put it on the list of things we might do next quarter, and we'll pull that list out at the end of the quarter."

But then by the time you get to the end of the quarter, you have populated a whole lot of things on that list because we visionary folks have a lot of ideas every week. And when you get to the end of the quarter, then you look and actually say some combination of, "Oh, there's more things here than we really need. These few are most important," or, "Oh, I had that idea at the time, but now that I look at all this stuff, it's probably not as important as some of these other things." So there's a prioritizing function that happens when they aggregate all of your ideas and then pull them back out in front of you at the end of the quarter.

Jenna: It has really helped my team because prior to having this structure, I would come up with this idea, tell everyone we needed to work on it. At some point, they'd drop what they were working on and start working on the thing. And then we'd talk about it the next weekly meeting, and I'd say something like, "Oh, that was a seven-year plan. You didn't need to drop what you're working on. We needed to finish that, and then maybe we were going to go to this new thing, this new idea."

And, of course, they were frustrated with me, as most staff is frustrated with the visionary because our heads are in the clouds and we're coming up with ideas that are intended for the future at the expense of the present. So this has really helped me not derail my team.

Using An "Identify, Discuss, Solve" Framework To Efficiently Address Issues That Crop Up [27:34]

Michael: Okay. So talk to us a little bit more about, I think, what you described as the IDS part of the meeting that comes at the end of the meeting. Can you explain a little bit more of what this is, what you do, what the structure is? What, again, does IDS mean?

Jenna: So that identify the problem, discuss it, and then solve it could be something like we have a client-specific email. So all of our clients email the client email instead of an individual person. This helps so that people can actually take days off because we know the tasks are getting taken care of, and then it also gets all of that clutter that we get in our personal...mailbox is out of the way. So we're working...

Michael: So you made a standard client inbox that lots of people can touch instead of having clients email an individual person.

Jenna: Exactly. So it was great. But our original process was leave it unread until you get to it. So, of course, that is going to fail because when you have a lot of hands in the same inbox, someone's going to accidentally make it read. It's not...no one's going to get to it. And so this was a problem that was brought to the meeting that needed to be discussed.

And so the solution was to create a project management system so that all the client tasks that were in the inbox, it was not just leave it unread, and that's the project management system. It was turn it into the actual project management system and make sure that those things got assigned to the correct person so that the task could be handled. And so it just takes something that is a kink in the business, like using a shared inbox and leaving things unread was a kink for us, and then turning it into a solution.

And then now that's a rock of, "Okay, who's going to take on implementing this software, making sure we're all trained on it so that a rock gets assigned?" So that's how you go through the process of you bring the problem to the meeting, and then it goes through that IDS process, turns into a rock, and someone actually handles solving for the problem.

Michael: And what's the significance of...why is it IDS? What does that mean? Why does it have a special label as opposed to just we have weekly meetings, and we figure stuff out?

Jenna: For our perspective, it is a clear line item and segment of the agenda. And what it does is it makes sure that we put the things that need to be discussed in a deeper way all together. As we all know, you group things together, and you're going to be more efficient. So instead of this popcorn meeting where you just discuss things as they come up and then you might not actually get to the most important things, anything that requires discussion gets dropped down into the IDS part of the agenda. So we're writing that agenda live during the meeting.

And then once we get to that end part of the meeting, which is the meat, but it's the end, we priority order the things that need to be discussed so that you don't get derailed by something that's not that important.

Michael: So I guess that's a good highlight. It's the end of the meeting, but it's the meat of the meeting. So this isn't like we do the other things than the last ten minutes of the meeting. We're trying to solve through some of this stuff. It's more like we do the other things briefly at the beginning of the meeting, and the meat of the meeting is this, it just comes after the initial things on the agenda.

Jenna: Correct.

Michael: And so then take us back up for a moment. So what comes before this in the agenda again, checking in our rocks, as you'd said, and what else is proceeding?

Jenna: We check in with each other. So we will do an emotional, physical check-in on what's going on with the team. And so if someone says, "I had a family member pass away this past weekend," that might turn into, when we get to IDS, us knowing she's not getting assigned to anything. We're going to figure out how to take all of her tasks off her list, identify that she needs a break, she needs the week off, identify that we need to solve for who's going to pick up her workload for the week.

And so that's an important check-in. It also is great for culture, and it's great for retention if you're actually asking people how they're doing. So we check in with each individual team member, and that's the beginning of the meeting. Sometimes it's just people sharing how fun their weekend is. Then we check in on the scorecard, then we check in on the rocks. And so if any of these things are off, obviously that's going to flag something that'll need to go down to that discussion.

And then we also will ask for highlights or struggles of the week. So we'll give employee headlines, we'll give customer, client headlines. And so we really go through this very formulaic beginning of the meeting where we check in on the business and on the staff and all the things that need to populate in that IDS section of the meeting come from that quick check-in.

Michael: And how long is the weekly meeting overall?

Jenna: It's scheduled for an hour and a half. We usually get it all done in an hour.

Michael: Okay. And how long are the first parts here? Is this 30 minutes of the 90-minute meeting, or is this 7 minutes of the 90-minute meeting?

Jenna: It probably takes us 15 minutes to get through it all. Maybe if people want to share how their weekend was, we'll go a little longer and let them have that water-cooler moment. But the way we report is on-track, off-track. There's no discussion. It's either AUM on-track, off-track. We can see the numbers, new households on-track, off-track. And so if it's off-track, usually someone will pipe up and say, "Hey, let's add that to the discussion. I want to know why you're off-track."

The Weekly And Quarterly Metrics Jenna Tracks On Her "Scorecard" [33:50]

Michael: So now take us all the way back to the discussion we kicked off with, the scorecard part of this meeting.

Jenna: The scorecard, we've made our own. And there are the basic things on the scorecard that you would think you would want to track to drive business, which are how often are you reaching out to prospects? How often are you connecting with touchpoints? Or, sorry, we call them touchpoints. How often are you doing a touchpoint with an A client or a COI [Center Of Influence]?

But we also added things that are more employee retention-driven. So we are tracking flex days, and we're tracking real days off, which is such an interesting thing to track. But by tracking real days off...and we define that as you cannot be connected to the team or a client in any fashion. If you answer an email or you answer a text question really quickly, you lost it. You get a flex day because you were working and having a day off-ish. So you can count that as a flex day, but you don't count it as a real day off.

What this effectively did is it gave us that work-life balance culture that so many people want. And it actually trained the staff to give me, as the founder, real days off. And instead of, "Oh, I can just ask Jenna really quick," they know they will rob me of a day off if they can't figure it out on their own. So it's really empowered everyone to figure out how to solve for something that can be solved for instead of, "Oh, quickly reach out, it's not a big deal." So we love tracking days off and setting a goal for how many days off we want to take each quarter.

Michael: So the idea of all these is these are weekly metrics. So I guess, how many metrics ultimately are you tracking? How many are on this scorecard?

Jenna: I don't have the number memorized, but I think we have six to eight touch points, and they are different for the advisor team versus the support staff because what they should be tracking and how they should be spending their time is different. And then for the meat of it, I think we have another maybe ten metrics that are something around referrals in, referrals out. Attending our L10 meeting is actually a metric that we started tracking. The basic AUM, new households, assets in. So assets in is different than new AUM in because if you're getting more people to set up recurring money coming in, so recurring ACHs, we're going to track that as well.

And then I do have in the pipeline quarterly metrics that we only touch when we do our quarterly meeting, and that's something like your close ratio. So we're looking at how many qualified prospects did you have versus how many new households did you close? And that's just a formula of those two numbers, but it's just silly to try to figure that out on a weekly basis. So there's certain things that we do look at of total AUM, AUM per household, revenue per household that we look at quarterly to make sure those are tracking as well.

Michael: Okay. And where does all this live?

Jenna: It lives in a Google Sheet. Each advisor or support staff has their own tab, and then they all total up to the team tab. And so everyone can pop in there and look at anyone else's numbers at any point in time.

Michael: I'm curious, is this something you'd be willing to share for folks that just want to see what does one of these look like?

Jenna: I would love to share it and actually just share the whole Google Sheet so that people can copy all the formulas because I spent way too long making it and looking for someone else who already made it, and I couldn't find anything online. So I would love to share it with people.

Michael: Oh, awesome, awesome. So for folks who are listening, this is Episode 506. So if you go to kitces.com/506 and scroll down the Show Notes section, we'll have a link out to Jenna's scorecard sheet.

So Jenna, can we pull this up and talk about what the line items are? Because again, I find so many questions from advisors of, "Yeah, but literally, what do you measure? What do you put on the scorecard?" That I'd love to know what line items have actually come onto your scorecard that you find useful to track on a weekly basis.

Jenna: Yeah, absolutely. I've pulled it up here, and I'm happy to go through what we're tracking, and we can even talk about what got cut because there were things like education hours, because professional excellence is a core value of ours. So we thought tracking the time someone spent learning was going to be a good metric. And at some point, we realized that was not something we wanted to track.

Michael: What went wrong with it? It sounds like a nice thing to track. Did you learn something every week?

Jenna: It didn't drive meaningful conversation, and it didn't move the needle on the business. It wasn't something that actually we could prove was worth tracking as some type of data point that was necessary. So we really only want to track data that we can do something with. So instead, we've implemented things like book club, where we'll all be reading a similar book together, and we can get together and talk about our takeaways. And that felt better than just, "I did three education hours last week."

Michael: Okay. So take me through, just line by line, what's on the scorecard? What do you actually track from week to week in a business?

Jenna: So for the advisor scorecard, which I think is the one that's probably the most relevant here, we have a whole section of touch points. And usually, everyone has a weekly goal of about ten touch points, is a pretty typical goal for the total touch points. That would be how many times do you want to reach out to a COI this week? How much effort are you doing for meaningful connections?

So we call that marketing and networking. So if you're out at a networking event and you meet a doctor client who says they don't know what to do about their retirement planning and they need help, that's a meaningful connection. We'll go ahead and put that there for the networking efforts. We'll also drop that into the pipeline.

There's outreach to opportunities. So that doctor you just met, following up with him, you would get an outreach point for that. We do track non-qualified prospect meetings in the touch point, but we track qualified prospect meetings down in more of that sales pipeline. So we break apart qualified and non-qualified prospect meetings, and then we can look at the ratio between the two. And we also track client meetings, and we do track how often are we touching our A clients. And so these are all things that we know if we set a goal and we work towards them, they're actually going to drive business in some way.

Michael: So touch points in your world, this is a combination. This can be business development-oriented touch points or existing client-oriented touch points. Because it sounds like there's a mixture of your COI touch points, meaningful connections to prospects, but also, I think you said my A client touch points as well.

Jenna: These are all things that we want to set as goals, is really how they ended up here. So the conversation of "We should be reaching out to our A clients more often." Everyone thinks that. We actually put it on our scorecard so we can set a goal and actually do it.

Michael: Nothing like looking at it and saying, "We said it was a thing, and I'm looking at the line item, and it's a zero for three weeks in a row. Apparently, we're not actually doing that as much as we thought. Because that's the point. You think you're doing the thing, and then you measure it and really get a sense of whether you're doing it. So does each line item have a goal, like do one COI touch point a week, do two meaningful connections a week, do four A client touch points a week? Is there a goal for each line item, or are you combining these and goals in some way?

Jenna: There's a goal for each line item. And we originally did these goals annually at our annual meeting and just divided by the number of weeks and called it a day. And that was not a good function for the way we do business because we do surge meetings. So there are two quarters that are very heavy on client meetings and A client touch points. And so we set these quarterly goals now so that we know, all right, we'll be doing a lot more client meetings and A client touch points during our surge quarters. But during our non-surge quarters, we really need to put a more focus on getting those prospect meetings, doing the networking. And so it's a balance of knowing what season you're in and making sure you're doing the right work for the right season.

Michael: Oh, interesting. So there's a weekly goal, but the goal for the week is different in surge season versus not surge season.

Jenna: I would really think about it as a goal for the quarter that gets divided into the number of weeks.

Michael: Okay. And so what else then, is on the scorecard? So I'm hearing that we've got a list of touch points and I guess outright client meetings for the advisors. So what else shows up in your scorecard?

Jenna: The next section is where we talk...and I do have our... I think I should point this out. I have our core values listed next to certain things on the KPIs on the scorecard because there's a why behind it. And so on the other section of our scorecard, we have the flex days, the days off, the L10 attendance. Some of these things are because we're purpose-driven. Having work-life balance is important to us. So we try to mirror what we...practice what we preach. We try to make sure our clients have a purpose-driven life.

We also do not want to work ourselves to the bone. And so celebrating those, as I've already talked about, but then also luxury experience with inbound and outbound referrals, making sure that we're really touching on our core values that also drive things like referrals. Referrals asked for is another thing that we track. And then we track the qualified prospect meetings down here along with new households and new assets in.

Michael: Okay. And then are there...you've talked about this in the context of advisors. How does scorecard work for the rest of the teams? I think you said there are three advisors, four admin. So are they just contributing to these when the whole team does well, we get new households and new assets in, or do admin staff have their own sets of metrics?

Jenna: They have their own sets of metrics because we've done various different marketing efforts. So, for example, we've done several paid lead campaigns. And so through that, someone needs to be following up on that paid marketing and we want to make sure that the dollars were well spent.

And so in some of the admin scorecards, it is, have we reached out to some of these? So have we done the reach out to the paid marketing leads? Have we connected with any of them? is a separate one. Have we converted any of them to meetings? And so we're tracking how many reach-outs do you need to make to get a connection versus to get a meeting and actually have some data there? It's helpful because people get discouraged with online lead generation when you reach out to 30 people and no one answers the phone.

And so if we have data and we can say, "Well, statistically, 1 out of every 30 answers the phone, so the next one you call should work," and just being able to make sure that people have the data. But we also can track, are these marketing dollars well spent?

Michael: Okay. So what else, besides marketing outreach, shows up on the admin side of things?

Jenna: They also have touch points for A clients, and they get points for proactive client outreach. So we actually had reactive client connections on here and we determined that we wanted to actually take that off because that is the busy work of clients reach out for XYZ, and you have to respond to it. We wanted the scorecard to really drive behavior that was not naturally happening.

So the proactive client outreach is where we're actually tracking a touch point there, and we actually find we have to do less reactive work if we're proactively having our admin staff reaching out to clients. And so there was a lot of intention and also a lot of what works, what doesn't work, removing some items on the scorecard as well.

Michael: So what happens if you're not hitting these metrics? So now I'm like, "Okay, so there's a lot of numbers every week, and I put it in a scorecard in a meeting, and then everybody stares at my numbers," and whether I got my numbers. What happens if I make my numbers? What happens if I'm missing my numbers?

Jenna: Well, everyone sets their own goals in our quarterly meeting. And so no one is given some type of quota that is above and beyond what they think is feasible. And so this does end up being a conversation in the weekly meetings as we're seeing someone who is not tracking for their goals. And then we do quarterly check-ins or performance reviews. And so it'll be a conversation there as well.

Luckily, I have a whole team of people who are goal-driven, and they love seeing the scorecard every single week, and it drives them to hit their numbers. And it just helps us get more work done. I would probably argue that someone who is not a good fit would probably end up self-selecting out because it's probably quite embarrassing to report every single week to your whole team that you are not doing the goals that you set for your job.

Michael: So I've got to ask, just how do you actually track and manage all this? For a lot of firms I know, it's a good amount of work to figure out, okay, really, how many households do we add? How many assets came in? What were our net flows? So we do it on a quarterly basis because it's good for quarterly planning, and we'll do the work once a quarter. And you're measuring this every week.

Just from a pure efficiency, not having this turn into a time sink, how do you actually track and manage this many different things? I think you've now highlighted, I don't know, a dozen or 15 or more different data points that show up on the scorecard every week. How do you track it all? How do you not make it time-laborious to keep track of all of these things?

Jenna: That was my biggest fear, is I'm such an efficiency brain. So the last thing I wanted was for someone to spend 45 minutes at the end of each day tracking what they did all day long. So I think we've really built this to not be time-intensive, but we've also integrated it into our culture.

So for me specifically, when I do my scorecard, I just know Monday morning before the meeting at some point, I need to look at my calendar last week. Everything that was in my calendar is what I did. And so it's quite simple for me to say, "All right. I had these A client touch points because we had all these reach-outs, and so that it was four for the last week." So mine takes me three minutes. I look at my calendar, I drop it in there.

My team, because the support staff is more into the every single day, we have a process when new money comes in, the team's tracking that to make sure the proper notifications are going out. So, for example, if a new ACAT comes in from a client, as soon as that hits, the team sends an email to the client letting them know your transfer is complete because that is a great luxury experience to not have a question mark, "Is my money transferred?" So that's part of our process.

But also, you just drop that number right onto the scorecard when it comes in. And so if anything, this went from me every single quarter trying to figure out, "All right, how many people did we close? And who came in? And where did they come from? And what marketing efforts were working?" To, "It's just second nature, and it happens as the business is coming in." So now my quarterly data is just right in front of me, and I can see, "Oh, I spent all this money on this marketing effort. We got zero clients from it, closed clients from it last quarter. What's going on here?" It's just in my face instead of me having to go hunt for it all.

Michael: Oh, interesting. So in your world, I guess not the scorecard per se, but the literal spreadsheet, the Google Sheet in which you track all these scorecard items, that has actually become the central data repository for the business overall. You get a new client, you just log it in the scorecard sheet, and then A, your scorecard metrics will be there because you just logged the new client, and B, now you've got a spreadsheet of business data to understand trends because all the clients got logged in the Sheet.

Jenna: Yeah. And the team loves getting the weekly points and celebrating the tiny weekly wins. And so things don't fall through the cracks because they love celebrating it. I'm a data person, obviously, so I'm still going at the end of quarters and end of years and just making sure things match because we like to reconcile things. But it's nice to just have your practice data in front of you. I'm waiting for AI to take over and us to not have to physically do this forever. So I do think there's a future where this happens for us. We're probably just not quite there yet.

What Pearl Capital Management Looks Like Today [53:44]

Michael: Okay. So now let me zoom out a bit. Tell us a little bit more about the business as a whole. Just what do you do? Who do you serve? Give us an overall picture of the advisory business.

Jenna: So we've got about $275 million assets under management with 2 senior advisors, myself and another. And then we do have one lead advisor who is just starting growing their book. But we really wanted to make sure that we were set up for recruiting and scale. So we've done a lot of this work to set us up to make sure that as new advisors come in, this is a great place for them to feel comfortable and supported.

As far as the clients that we serve, I think there's about 110 households across that book of business. And really, I started as a generalist, so I have a lot of clients across the board, but I've really niched into serving, doing my best work for retirees, people who are going through that retirement transition, and entrepreneurs, because I'm a visionary with them. And a lot of entrepreneurs love EOS, and they love that I can speak this language with them and say, "Here's how I implemented it in my business." So the fact that I'm trying business strategies that business owners across the board use or want to try, and I can speak their language, has really made me an attractive advisor to other entrepreneurs.

My other senior advisor, she has a CDFA. So she specializes in people who've gone through divorce, widows, a lot of single women. So we have that part of our practice. And then the newer advisor we have with us, she has a whole real estate background. So really interesting that we actually are able to be advisors to real estate investors, which is usually not a demographic that people go after because they like all their money to go to real estate.

But we're finding that as real estate investors are nearing retirement, they realize they've never had an advisor before, they can't spend the equity in their properties, and it's time to have a strategy to start liquidating because they want access to more than just the rents. And so that's been an interesting demographic that has been underserved, that one of our advisors is using as her niche.

Michael: And so each advisor has some niche, but they're different by the advice. Each of them is formulating their own thing because you do retirees and entrepreneurs, and the other senior does divorcees, and the newer advisor does folks with real estate background.

Jenna: It's worked well for our team, and it helps us to do niche marketing, but also when someone comes to us with a problem. So inevitably, I'll have a client that is asking questions about divorce, and I can say, "I have a specialist on our team, let me loop her in," instead of me potentially losing that business to an outside advisor who specializes in that. And so it's neat to be able to pull each other in when necessary. Or hypothetically, I have a client who wants to buy a rental property, and I say, "I have an advisor who specializes in analyzing buying that rental property. Let's pull her in."

Michael: And where is revenue of the business overall at this point?

Jenna: Just about $2 million in annual revenue. Or I guess we've crossed that threshold.

How Jenna’s Approach To Fees Has Changed Over Time [57:26]

Michael: And what is the business model, the revenue model? Is this AUM fees, is this planning fees? Are you hybrid with commission revenue as well? How does that actually break out for you?

Jenna: So we are fee-only. So we don't do any...we don't have any commission products, and 99% of our clients are on our tiered AUM billing schedule. So it's tiered like taxes, where you pay each of the brackets instead of that cliff where you change to a new bracket. I've tried flat fee planning for a handful of clients, and I've found they're my worst clients. I am not happy.

Michael: Oh, no.

Jenna: Yeah, it hasn't worked well for me. And I keep thinking this is where the industry is going, but I really think we are just an AUM firm. It hasn't worked well for us so far.

Michael: So what makes them not good clients for you?

Jenna: So an example would be they want us to do the planning work as we are paid to do, but then there's always the conversation about these outside investments, these obscure holdings that we are not doing research on out of our normal day-to-day. They want us to give thoughts and commentary. So we're adding extra research on these investments that we would have never been thinking about otherwise. So it's really creating all of this additional work because we are yes people and we don't say, "No, you're not paying us for investment research. So that is outside of the scope." We end up saying, "Sure, I can look at that," and then one-off turns into too many. And it's become more than only planning, is what it's turned into. And I think half of it is a me problem for not just saying no.

Michael: Because the challenge with that model is just everything they want, I either need to price upfront or I need to price additionally, or I need to say no. And those are just hard conversations sometimes in real time.

Jenna: Those are harder conversations. And our flat planning fees are not inexpensive. So we do want to make sure that they feel like they're getting a good service. And we have this core value of a luxury experience that we want all of our clients to feel. And we have the profit margins to do that for AUM clients, where we can really give them that luxury experience.

We start squeezing ourselves and looking at things a little bit differently when we have that flat fee. And we have to start talking about, "They're asking for too much, and they're leaning on the team too much. We need to promote them up to the next fee agreement." Now I'm selling a higher tier, and I just haven't had a great experience with the flat fee so far. I might need someone to teach me otherwise.

Michael: So I guess stylistically, it feels better or easier when you've just priced for the more holistic AUM relationship, and now there's no inhibition to leaning into high-touch service because you know you're getting paid for it. There's no separate conversation about it.

Jenna: And clients naturally require, not 100% of the time, but most of the time, they naturally require about the work that their assets equal. So a client that's got $1 million to $3 million requires a certain level of strategy and planning versus a client who has $30 million. It's a completely different conversation, but the compensation equals the extra work necessary for those more complex issues.

Michael: And so then, what does the actual fee schedule look like for you? Where does that fee schedule start in terms of fees and breakpoints?

Jenna: Our first tier starts at 1.5%, and it goes down as you hit the different areas, all the way up to... I think $50 million-plus is 0.6%. So again, like I said, you pay all the tiers. So even that $50 million-plus client that's at 0.6%, they're still paying...

Michael: That's only above $50 million.

Jenna: It's only above, yeah. They're still paying that 1.5% bracket for that first bracket.

Michael: And how far does that first bracket go? Do you know?

Jenna: I think it only goes up to $750 [thousand]. So it is pretty low. But just those little increments versus having the cliff of all of your assets move into a new bracket, I felt that wasn't really working from a practice management standpoint. So we redid our fees to be this tiered approach.

Michael: Oh, so you actually were cliff-based and changed to tiered.

Jenna: It was pretty early that I made the change.

Michael: Okay. What wasn't working for you on the cliff side?

Jenna: I was actually signing the contracts wrong. So I was a new advisor, and I was signing contracts at you are at 1% up until this threshold. And then I was needing to go in and get a new contract signed when they got a discount. Okay, now you get to drop to 0.8%. And that's why it was really easy for me to change everything because it just said this is automatically going to give you these lower break points as you have dollars going into the next level.

Michael: Okay. Because early on, if they started at a 1% tier, you just literally signed an advisory agreement that said 1%, and you could tell them, "If you hit this new threshold, I'll change your fee schedule." But because that wasn't written in, you actually needed a new agreement when they hit the threshold and needed a new fee schedule.

Jenna: You don't know what you don't know. I hired attorneys to write the contract for me, and apparently, they didn't think to write in those natural break points.

Michael: Okay. And so as that got painful, then you just said, "I'm just going to do the tiers anyways?"

Jenna: Yes.

Michael: Okay. So is there a minimum as well, of a minimum fee or minimum assets, or anyone can join and just go through the fee schedule tiers?

Jenna: So I typically say that a million dollars to work with me just because I'm at that 80-client threshold, where I just feel like I don't want to have more clients than I can give a really high-quality service with. But the firm's stated minimum is only $250 [thousand] because I do still want to be able to bring new advisors to this profession. I do have this part of me that is advocating for bringing more women to the profession. And so just because there's not a lot of female advisors, we're getting better, but bringing new women to the profession, I need to make sure that I'm not putting them at a disadvantage with too high of a minimum to start.

Michael: Okay. And then I've got to ask, just in a world where so many advisors talk about the proverbial 1%, your fee schedule starts at 1.5%. Does this crop up with clients, or I guess with prospects, of why do you charge 1.5%, other advisors charge 1%, or is that just in our heads as advisors and clients don't actually ask?

Jenna: I have not had anyone concerned about it. But what I do is I give away the farm in our prospect meetings, as a lot of us do, where I tell them, "I am intentionally giving you some freebie ideas, suggestions, strategies, and if you really want to go self-implement, that's great. We can part ways as friends. You'll probably go refer me to your friends because you know you'll get some freebie ideas here. But if you like it, I'm showing you how it's made behind the scenes."

So it's not this black box of what is it going to be like on the other side of signing this agreement? They're actually starting to see some of the strategy ahead of time, which a lot of advisors do this. And I know there's a lot of different schools of thought of giving away free advice at the beginning, but it's really working well for us, and it makes fees never a conversation because they know what they're getting for that fee.

Jenna’s Approach To Prospect Meetings [1:06:31]

Michael: Okay. So then can you walk us through a little bit further? What does that prospect approach, I guess, sequence, or offering look like? How many meetings? What do you do in each meeting to navigate this?

Jenna: So the first meeting is a lot of get to know you. I allow people when they book that first meeting to have access to eMoney. So we'll actually send them an invite, invite them to share any documents that they want to discuss, invite them to link any accounts that they'd like to link, so that... And it's just completely optional, but we say, "The meeting will be more impactful, and you'll get more from it if you share more information," but up to them.

And so some people have 100% of their information fully linked in eMoney by the time I sit down for the first meeting. So I can really just jump right into planning conversations with them. And those people are actually my best conversion ratio because they're already fully committed. They're already integrated. We're already talking about a plan. And so usually, I'm sending them Docusign paperwork after the first meeting. So sending them the ability to share data with us early is helpful for certain clients.

Then there's the people who are completely nervous. They don't want to tell you a thing about it until they sit with you in person and look you in the eyes. And so that first meeting is a little different. I usually need a second meeting with them to really get to that planning conversation. And then we're sending Docusigns for new accounts after the second meeting.

Michael: So you don't necessarily produce a planning deliverable, here's a list of recommendations. You're discussing and telling them live in the meeting, what kinds of planning ideas and conversations?

Jenna: Correct. So it's just a live conversation about ideas that make sense for their particular financial situation. And then they get something more formal, written, the second meeting after they're a client. So the first meeting after they're a client, so they sign new accounts, money starts transferring, and we hold an investment meeting after money is in motion. So we never talk about investments until there's money flowing towards us. And that's when we sit down, we talk about risk tolerance, what do they want for this money? What's the purpose? And then the meeting following that is really onboarding of the plan.

Michael: Okay. Okay. So at the prospect end, it's a very ideas-oriented meeting. It's not a proposals and offer deliverable meeting, but your goal is share enough ideas that they say, "That would be helpful. Can you help us do that?" That's what we're building up to.

Jenna: That's the goal, is to show them we have enough ideas and strategy and planning focus that this is really going to be worth your time and worth your money to hire this team. And so it's enough for them to want more. If it's an engineer who wants to understand the mechanics of how the Roth conversion is going to work and I need to explain to them, harvesting the brackets, and they want to go implement it themselves, he was not going to be a client anyways, so I'm okay showing him how it's made so that he can self-implement. So I'm not trying to hide anything, but I also don't want to overwhelm anyone.

The Ups And Downs Of Jenna’s Path To Starting Her Own Advisory Business [1:10:13]

Michael: So what surprised you the most on this journey of building an advisory business?

Jenna: It was the fact that I grew up in the broker-dealer side of the industry. I wanted the biggest split, the most of what the client fee was, and I wanted to be left alone. And so that is how I thought of the practice from 20 years ago. And when I launched the firm ten years ago, that's how I built our compensation structure, was leave you alone and give you the highest cut. And the team that I'm growing wants a team. They want support, they want resources, they want flexibility, they want someone who can cover so they can have a real day off, as we talked about with some of these metrics that we decided to track.

And so what I thought was what made sense for me is not what I've ended up building. So I'm actually currently redoing our compensation structure to create something that's more team-focused. And so that was a big surprise for me, and it's a pivot that I'm working on in real time.

Michael: So can I ask at least what was the comp structure? What is it if you're up to this point? How did you build it in the first place?

Jenna: It started at the advisor keeps 70% of the revenue. That was the beginning of the payout. It went all the way up to 90% to the advisor. And then I think I had it once you hit $100 million, we went into making partner, profit sharing because my thought was once someone has $100 million of AUM with us, the chances they leave and go start their own practice are likely, so I need to make them a partner so that they stay and I have ownership here. And I wrote it in that fashion of the fear that people leave for money instead of what I'm building, which is people want to be a part of the team, which is it's different.

Michael: So how do you envision this changing going forward then?

Jenna: It'll be more team-oriented. I do have the two legacy advisors that I am not going to pull the rug out from under them if they want to continue to be on a payout grid. But I think I do need to make sure that if support and resources are more important that I am pricing that into the compensation. It's really just a work in progress. I don't have the answer right now, but I'm listening to your past podcasts of other advisors that have shared compensation structure for teams, so I can figure out what actually works.

Michael: And just because you said the existing folks may want to stay on the payout grid, is the idea that you're not even sure you're going to be on a payout grid in the future? It might be a salaried or other style approach, or that's still part of the collective question?

Jenna: It's still part of the question. In my mind right now, I think I'll have an option where an advisor can be payout grid or salary plus incentive bonuses. I think that's where I'm going to go, but I probably need to hire some people smarter than me to coach me through the pros and the cons of having two options for payout.

Michael: Okay. So what was the low point on this journey for you?

Jenna: Oh, the low point would have been when I was leaving the broker-dealer that I was with. I had spent a lot of time interviewing and trying to find the best place. It was an independent broker-dealer, so my book was portable. And I actually almost joined a large banking institution that wanted me to run Arizona for them, which was an honor, but I realized I was way too entrepreneurial for that. So I found this RIA firm.

Michael: Too entrepreneurial to work for a big bank.

Jenna: I know. So I found this RIA firm out of Georgia. They wanted me to run the West side of it. And so that felt safe. There was still a connection to a bigger organization, but I got to spread my wings and run the West side of the country. And so I announced this to my clients, we're moving, and accounts are in motion. And in the middle of moving all of my clients to this firm, they're trying to change our agreement. They are changing their ownership. There's some type of ownership change. Things just felt like I cannot trust these people. And my clients were in motion. And I realized I could not...

Michael: To the new firm.

Jenna: To this new firm, that I all of a sudden realized I cannot trust these people. And we had talked for eight months up until this, so it wasn't a knee-jerk decision to move. And so I actually just thought, "Maybe I can't trust people in finance." I had got advice early as a young woman in finance, where my assigned mentor told me, "You should just be a bank teller until you get a husband. This isn't for little girls."

Michael: Oh, my gosh.

Jenna: And so I'm hearing all the people who told me I wasn't going to make it in finance in this moment. And what did I do? I started a firm.

Michael: Yeah, stick it to them all.

Jenna: So that is actually how Pearl Capital Management was born, was it was a "I don't know who I can trust, but it's not those guys, and it's not those guys, and it's not those guys because they all screwed me over. So I guess it's either bet on me or leave finance altogether."

And so I actually put Pearl Capital together as my clients need to go somewhere. They're in motion. They can't go there. They can't stay there. So where are they coming? Let's create this firm, and then I'll probably have to merge or join with someone or figure it out after a year.

And so it wasn't anything other than an answer to adversity. And I picked my head up after a year and said, "Oh, this is working. I probably should make an announcement that I opened a firm," because I hadn't even done an announcement. I was just in survival mode for the first year.

Michael: Oh, so I guess, truly for you, it was just, "I can't continue the transfers to the firm I was going to. I have to make something just so clients can transfer somewhere else."

Jenna: That was how it was born. I did not have all my ducks in a row. I've always been entrepreneurial. I knew I would have loved to open a firm at one point in time, but I was 29 years old when I launched the firm. No one thinks that a little 29-year-old girl should own an RIA firm. So I didn't think I was ready for it. I didn't think that was the part of my career where I should have done that yet. But in hindsight, it's the best thing that ever happened to me.

Michael: And so at what point...? I don't know, was there a moment of, "I think I've made it, this thing is going to survive?"

Jenna: It was probably year two, two and a half, three, three years in. So I was in my early 30s, and the snowball was rolling. I was getting all these referrals. It was getting really easy. I was so excited that I had ownership of this firm. And I really remember feeling like the snowball that I had pushed uphill in this career for a decade was finally not this heavy thing to push up the hill, but now it's rolling down, and I'm chasing it, trying to get my hands around it, and it's building without me.

So I felt that. And this is an interesting thought, but I remember looking up, and most of my sorority sisters, my female friends in business, they were all taking this step back from their career because they're all in their early 30s, to have kids. And that's really when the snowball first started rolling for me. And I realized just what a disadvantage that moment in time is for so many women to take that step back, because that was the exact moment where it finally got legs.

Michael: And so what happened in that…I guess there's a window of you did the transition for the first year just because it had to survive and land somewhere if you weren't going to go to the other firm. It didn't really feel like the snowball was rolling until year two or three. So what kept you going in the in-between phase that you didn't turn back after 18 months and say, "Okay, I need to go find another firm to join?" What kept you in the I'm going on my own even though I'm not quite at the stable, survival, it's working phase yet?

Jenna: Well, I had my clients that came with me. So I had that built-in revenue. So I'm very fortunate that I started profitable. So I didn't start with a net negative firm, which... I'm building a different company right now that has been net negative for the first couple of years. So that's a different story, and the first time I've had to do that. But to have positive revenue, it was good enough to be a lifestyle practice and just service the clients.

The difference of the snowball rolling was when the referrals started catching, and I realized, "Oh, I have to hire. Oh, I need to really put systems around this thing. It's not just me, lifestyle, serving my clients. It's going to be a real company.

Building Her Own Advisor Lead Generation Service [1:20:28]

Michael: Okay. And then what...? So you mentioned there. So what's the separate company you're building now?

Jenna: Well, I told you I was an entrepreneur. So my sister's whole career is in technology. And obviously, I have this finance background. And so we joined forces and made a FinTech company that is lead generation for advisors, but it solves a unique problem, which is what we hear when we go to conferences. Everyone's talking about the great wealth transfer and how the majority of wealth is transferring to women. So all of us advisors, we know we should get in front of more women clients, but there's never someone who tells you how. And so this lead generation service, it's called Svvy, spelt without an A, so it's S-V-V-Y. Svvy is specifically female investors that we connect with carefully vetted advisors. So it solves that. How do you get in front of more women investors?

Michael: Okay. And so you're operating in that space of lead generation for advisors. So how do they pay for the service? Are you the revenue-sharing type, the pay-per-lead type? What's your model? What's Svvy's model?

Jenna: Svvy's model is flat monthly subscription for leads. And they say niche marketing works, and it's really working for us because the goal is to get advisors about ten leads a month. And that's where we priced everything at. And what reality is, is this is what women have been looking for, is something that they feel is to them. It's targeted to them. It has this trustworthy brand. And so our advisors are averaging 30 leads a month right now because the marketing's working too well.

So we're very pleased with this thing taking off, but I'm having to ask myself who's going to lead it because I can't. It's taking off. I can't lead both companies at this point. So I'm actually searching for someone to step in as CEO of Svvy so that that can go to the next level.

Michael: So in that world, how do you, I guess, vet advisors, evaluate fit? What do folks have to do to qualify or be a fit for the platform?

Jenna: So I told you I like helping women. Obviously, it's becoming a theme here. So I've hired stay-at-home moms who are looking at coming back to the workforce, but they want that flexibility to be the people who interview the advisors who want to be a part of Svvy. And so it is not a peer conversation with someone in the industry. It is your average mom who gets a gut feeling of, "He would be great. I would trust him," or "Maybe I feel like I'm being mansplained to. I don't know if this gives me a good feeling." So that is the interview process, is we actually are just using real women to say, "This feels like someone that is trustworthy."

Michael: And then where do prospects leads come from? How are they finding Svvy?

Jenna: So we ditched anything that was social media lead generation really fast because we found those to be pretty poor-quality leads. And that's what most of the competition is doing, is they're using that. Just change their interest in the moment. And it's a bad experience for everyone. So we are intentionally looking for people who are actively searching. So we're doing a lot of Google Ads, we're doing a lot of AI search. So someone who is saying, "I just got a divorce. I need an advisor. My husband just passed away. I need an advisor." We're really looking for women in transition trying to find something that's trustworthy. And so our branding is very niche to that woman to see this is a place I can trust to find an advisor.

Jenna’s Advice For Her Younger Self And For Newer Advisors [1:24:43]

Michael: Okay. So what are the, I guess, other things, like pearls of wisdom, what you know now from experience you wish you could go back and tell you 10 or 20 years ago from what you've learned in the journey? What do you know now you wish you could go back and tell you then?

Jenna: Oh, I wish I knew that I was not for everyone. Of course, all of us new advisors, or every advisor knows you're supposed to find this niche, but most of us don't. The reality is most of us start as generalists because we're hungry and we just want someone who's willing to trust us.

And so when you're in that generalist place, and you think, "I just want to close the business, the person that's sitting in front of me," I took it to heart when someone just wanted a golfing buddy that was his peer that was nearing retirement as well to be an advisor, the guy that it looks like him in the movies. And I was never going to be his golfing buddy. And I took it to heart, and I was always trying to figure out how could I convince him that I was smart and that I was trustworthy, and I was still going to be working when he retired? And I was coming up with all of these issues in my head of why can't I close this business?

And gosh, it probably took me seven to ten years to realize he doesn't want me, and that's okay. And I don't need to waste my thoughts and energy on someone who doesn't want an advisor like me because there's plenty of people who do. And so just realizing you're not for everyone and accepting that is such a different perspective the way you approach your career. And I wish I knew that earlier.

Michael: That's powerful. So what other advice would you have for younger, newer advisors coming into the profession today and trying to get started, get going?

Jenna: Oh, well, I do tell younger advisors you're not for everyone. That's probably my favorite thing to share with them. But I love to share the struggles, that it is hard, that you will see your friends who went to law school making a lot more money than you in the early stages, and you'll question everything, and that is normal. But it does get easier. The snowball does start rolling. So I love using that visual of pushing the snowball up the mountain and then it catching traction and rolling down.

And so once you get to the other side of the mountain, knowing that, I think it's the best career out there, that all you have to do January 1 is keep your clients, and you know how much revenue you're going to make. Your lawyer friends need to know who needs a lawsuit this year. So I think it's cliché advice, but the advice is just power through. It's worth it. It gets easier.

What Success Means To Jenna [1:27:42]

Michael: Power through. It's worth it. It gets easier. I like it. So Jenna, as we come to the end, this is a podcast about success. And just one of the themes that always comes up is that literal word, success, means different things to different people, right? It can change for us as we go through stages of the business, seasons of life. So you've built this wonderfully successful business as you're crossing $2 million of revenue, and the team and the clients are expanding. So the business seems to be in a wonderful place. How do you define success for yourself personally at this point?

Jenna: So my thoughts around success stem from the freedom of time. And we trade our time for money, but time is the resource that I don't think gets enough focus. The money gets the focus usually, especially for us in finance. But someone who's really made it and is successful, they get to choose freely how to spend their time. It's when you hit the threshold where you no longer are forced to trade your time for money. And it's not a dollar amount because you could be living off the land, and you could be perfectly fine not having a conventional job, or you could need to fly around in private jets, and you need to make sure you have X amount of millions of dollars in the bank to get to that freedom. But I really define success as are you there where you get to choose how to freely spend your time, or are you still forced to trade your time for money?

Michael: Do you get to choose how to spend your time, or are you still forced to trade time for money?

Jenna: It's the freedom to spend your time freely as you wish.

Michael: Okay. I love that. I love that. Well, thank you, Jenna, for joining us on the "Financial Advisor Success" podcast.

Jenna: Thank you, Michael. It's been a pleasure.

Michael: Absolutely. Thank you.