Welcome back to the 360th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Suzanne Powell. Suzanne is a Senior Financial Advisor at Meridian Wealth Management, an RIA based in Lexington, Kentucky, where she oversees approximately $110 million in assets under management for nearly 150 client households.

What's unique about Suzanne, though, is how she grew to more than $100M of AUM by intentionally organizing her schedule from month to month throughout the year, clustering client and nearly all of her prospect meetings in the Fall and Spring, allowing her to spend the remaining 6 months away from the office and with her family, while still not needing to spend much time on prospecting by leveraging (and almost fully automating her responses to) a steady flow of SmartAsset leads.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Suzanne has been able to drive client growth through the lead-generation service SmartAsset and dials the lead flow up or down depending on how busy her month is, the way Suzanne has set up a series of email and especially text message automations that allow her to convert a very high percentage of her SmartAsset leads into clients without needing to be available to immediately to inquiries reply herself, and how Suzanne has customized the targeting of which leads she buys from SmartAsset to ultimately generate nearly $70M of new assets over the past 5 years for less than $100,000 in cumulative marketing spend.

We also talk about how Suzanne structures her weekly meeting schedule to balance the need to have 5 to 6 meetings a day during her busy seasons while still having time to prepare for each meeting and complete follow-up tasks, how Suzanne uses a standardized client meeting agenda to stay on track and ensure each meeting fits within the allotted 1-hour time block, and how Suzanne leverages technology – including a large, retractable television monitor located next to her desk – to present and adjust her clients' financial plans during the meetings instead of presenting them with a physical plan (which saves essential meeting prep time during her busy meeting season).

And be certain to listen to the end, where Suzanne shares how she entered the financial advisory industry without a Bachelor's degree and how she earned her degree 20 years later by taking college courses while working full-time as an advisor and will now officially be able to become a CFP certificant, how bringing her own consistent and authentic presence has allowed Suzanne to convert prospects into clients several years after their first contact with her (because as Suzanne notes, the fact that someone doesn't become a client today doesn't mean they aren't still watching and keeping up with you!), and why Suzanne has taken an approach of not trying to work and save for retirement as a time to enjoy when she gets there, but instead has structured her busy-season-light-season approach to client meetings to allow for more space to enjoy trips and time with her family now, instead.

So, whether you're interested in learning about how to use a compressed meeting schedule to free up time away from your business, how to structure those meetings to effectively provide value to clients, or the tools Suzanne uses to automate the process of converting SmartAsset leads to viable prospects, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Suzanne Powell. 

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Welcome back to the 358th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Veronica Karas. Veronica is a Senior Financial Advisor at CAPTRUST and works from the RIA's Lake Success, New York, office, where she oversees $360 million in assets under management for about 200 client households.

What's unique about Veronica, though, is the unique 3-question approach she uses to generate referrals not only from clients, but also from centers of influence as well, and even uses it to get referrals from prospects… all without being too pushy or salesy.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Veronica developed her 3 referral questions – which first ask clients (and others) to reflect on what else she could be doing from them that would be valuable, then what are the services she and her firm provide that are the most valuable, and then whether there is anyone in their lives that could use help with those same services they just said are so valuable – and to please facilitate an introduction to those individuals in need, how Veronica built this 3-question approach because she didn't have a natural network of friends and family to give her referrals and had to figure out how to comfortably ask the existing clients of one of her mentors, and the way that Veronica follows up with the introductions she receives to turn them into new business opportunities!

We also talk about how, amidst onboarding 52 new clients in a single year (due to the success of her 3-question approach), Veronica developed a blueprint that all new clients would go through in their 1st year with the firm that leverages a more modular approach to planning and stretches out the planning work (for the client, and her own team) over the span of 12 months, how Veronica's firm structures associate advisors to work with multiple senior advisors at once to not only offer high-touch service to their client households but give those associate advisors more intentional opportunities to learn what they can by being in meetings with many different experienced advisors of the firm, and how Veronica's firm structures its advisor compensation to both empower associate advisors to take over client relationships and still have the incentive to learn to build their own book of business as well.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Veronica shares how she overcame her early-career feelings that she was too young to serve as a lead advisor, how a commitment to talking about her work with at least 5 people each day for 2 years, from strangers at Target to fellow advisors, helped Veronica to overcome her fears and generate a rising flow of prospect leads and introductions to key referral partners, and how Veronica has maintained her focus on doing the right thing to navigate ethical dilemmas that have arisen over the course of her career, even when it meant leaving a job after less than a year to start over somewhere else.

So, whether you're interested in learning about a structured approach to generating more referrals, how to create a systematized process for a client's 1st year, or how to overcome the challenges of starting out and creating your own book of business, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Veronica Karas.

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Welcome back to the 339th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Eric Roberge. Eric is the Founder and CEO of Beyond Your Hammock, an independent RIA based in Boston, Massachusetts, that oversees $47 million in assets under management for more than 80 client households.

What's unique about Eric, though, is how, 10 years after launching his firm and enjoying strong and steady growth, he hit a capacity wall as a solo advisor and suddenly found the business going backwards, as a $4 million client decided to relocate, and market volatility caused several other clients to leave his firm (which meant a loss of $100,000 in recurring revenue), all while he and his wife had their first child… leading Eric to go through a year of rebuilding multiple components of his business from staffing to technology to their client service calendar to get back on track again.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about how, in 2022, Eric and his wife Kali faced a tumultuous year the firm dipped from $600,000 to $500,000 of revenue run rate in just the first few months and because it coincided with the arrival of their first child they didn’t have the bandwidth and capacity to adapt, how, to help with capacity constraints, Eric decided to ramp up part-time outsourced assistance (from Nifty Advisors for a part-time virtual assistant and East Bay Financial for a part-time virtual Chief Investment Officer), and how, to create even more lift in capacity constraints, Eric changed the firm’s meeting cadence from meeting with clients 3X per year to only twice a year, utilizing a surge meetings structure to both give him months of time back to focus on the firm as a whole (and also to be able to respond more quickly to client needs throughout the year as they arise).

We also talk about how Eric’s decision to get a formal valuation from FP Transitions not only helped crystallize the significance of what he’d built (when he saw the valuation from a third party) but also created a new perspective on where to focus his time to best increase enterprise value going forward, how Eric is focusing on increasing connections with prospects by creating content on his website and hiring a PR firm to help him get guest podcast appearances and then drive traffic back to his website and grow the firm’s marketing funnel, and why Eric offers a fee calculator on his website (that allows clients to enter their assets and see exactly what the fee will add up to be in actual dollars) because he’s found that prospective clients knowing exactly how much they would be paying in fees is helping build trust early on.

And be certain to listen to the end, where Eric shares why, even though he experienced a lot of challenges in 2022, he is grateful for the opportunities it brought him as he feels it helped better his communication with his wife, how Eric came to realize that in building a business, the solution to challenges early on was to work harder, better, and more efficiently, but that eventually there comes a point where you have to re-tool the business’s systems and processes or you just run out of time and energy, and how living through the challenges of 2022 has helped Eric become more intentional in how he builds his firm, with a newfound appreciation of the benefits that come from focusing – really focusing – on changing what you can control and letting go of the rest.

So, whether you’re interested in learning about how Eric struggled to find a lead advisor that was both a good fit and was willing to take on some business development which led him and his wife to revamping their processes instead, how, even though Eric and his wife experienced a downturn in the business, he was prepared economically as he had saved a large amount of money in case of emergencies, or how Eric leverages his FP Transitions’ subscription service to receive benchmarking data that helped him realize he not only has a younger clientele than most firms of his size, but that his average fee per client is larger than other firms, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Eric Roberge.

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Welcome back to the 330th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!

My guest on today's podcast is Ari Weisbard. Ari is Managing Partner of Values Added Financial, an independent RIA based in Washington, D.C., that oversees $143 million in assets under management (AUM) for nearly 75 client households.

What's unique about Ari, though, is how he and his partner, Zach, not only initiated fee minimums to ensure that they could profitably serve their clients, but subsequently have intentionally raised, and then lowered, their fees and minimums to slow down and then increase their growth pace during different stages of their business based on their firm's advisor capacity, and at least simply to create space for themselves to sustain their own healthy work-life balance.

In this episode, we talk in-depth about why Ari and his partner implemented a minimum fee for new clients as the business grew, raised the minimum as high as $15,000 during the pandemic, and have since cut their minimum fee back down to $6,000 even as the firm has added more advisors and overhead, how Ari and his partner got comfortable positioning their firm as one that serves clients with progressive political values (which they ultimately felt would ensure clients were aligned with their own personal values, and in turn could both help them better serve their clients, and alleviated the concern of whether their political advocacy outside of their firm could alienate clients with differing political views). We also talk about why Ari and his firm have leaned into values-based investing to further differentiate with their unique clientele not by utilizing ESG funds, but instead choosing ETFs that are more proactive with their proxy voting, and implementing Ethic Investing to offer clients a 'Personalized Indexing' approach while also capitalizing on the tax benefits of tax loss harvesting.

We discuss about why Ari and his partner sought to bring more diversity to their hiring process not by trying to seek diverse candidates, but instead by removing industry-specific certification requirements and offering paid parental leave so that they can attract more diverse candidates who have the essential communication and client empathy skills that they can train internally to get up to speed on the technical knowledge. We moved to how Ari recognized that he suffered from anxiety and imposter syndrome early in his career and decided to seek help through both personal therapy and George Kinder's life planning training so that he could let go of some of the fear that he had in growing and scaling the business beyond Zach and himself, and get comfortable with not having control of every aspect of the business as it grows, and why, as the firm raised and lowered fees, Ari was not afraid of losing opportunities to find more clients because he felt that clearly defining their values and how it aligns to their business will always give them an opportunity to find the right types of clients when the firm is ready to grow more (while also ensuring they are growing the business based on the values that matter to them and not just purely from an economic standpoint).

And be certain to listen to the end, where Ari shares why he feels that though he made more of an intellectual impact in his former profession as a lawyer, he feels more fulfilled now as a financial advisor as he can feel more of an emotional impact as he helps his clients feel more satisfied in their own lives, why Ari believes that younger, newer advisors would benefit from demonstrating their listening skills rather than having the answer to every client question (as he has found that's what really provides more value to clients). We conclude with why Ari feels grateful that the advisory business model is so successful, as it takes away the pressure to focus on the business economics and instead gives him more opportunities to connect with the human aspect of financial planning and create deep and meaningful relationships with the people around him and in his life.

So, whether you're interested in learning about why Ari and his partner raised fees during the pandemic to slow growth and give them more space to focus on their families and their own well-being, why Ari and his partner lowered fees later on because they wanted to be more inclusive to the types of clients they served, or why Ari and his partner feel their values-based planning helps their progressive clientele make more of an impact on the world with their money, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Ari Weisbard.

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