Download Dan Allisont's "Current COI Feedback Scripts" and "New Potential COI Scripts" below, and check out "Getting A Healthy Flow Of New Clients From Centers Of Influence By Addressing The Referral Risk They Fear The Most: #FASuccess Ep 447 With Dan Allison" on how he coaches advisors to generate more leads from Centers Of Influence (COIs) such as CPAs and attorneys by building trusting relationships to reduce the professional risk that the COIs take when referring one of their clients to a financial advisor.
Current and New Potential COI Feedback Scripts
It is often said that "the only thing constant is change", which pairs well with the common financial advisor philosophy, "if you’re not growing, you’re dying". The end result of this dynamic is that even when advisory firms are successful and clients are well served, we’re constantly on the lookout for what we could be doing differently to serve clients better, and have to remain constantly vigilant to threats from the changing landscape (from volatile markets to the rise of AI).
And the same holds true for Kitces.com and our Nerd’s Eye View blog as well. Even as our readership (and listenership, and viewership) has grown over the years, and our reader retention remains incredibly high, we remain ever vigilant about the changing landscape and how we can still improve further, whether it’s refining how we deliver the articles, podcasts, and videos that we do, exploring alternative content formats or approaches, or figuring out how to best leverage AI ourselves, to better serve all of you, our advicer readers.
And so every year, we ask you – our readers – for feedback about what you want to make this website even better for you, to ensure we stay on the right track in adding value to the advicer community and making financial advisors better and more successful. And especially after the amount of change over the past few years, from expanding our podcasts to YouTube (and creating a new "Best Advisor Podcasts" list), to building an AdvisorTech Directory to complement (and provide more information than) our popular AdvisorTech Map, to the rollout of our Annual IAR Ethics CE Day… we’re more eager than ever for your feedback about how we’re doing, where we can improve, your thoughts about some new ideas we’re considering, and your feedback about what else we could be doing to help the advicer community.
Because we really do take your feedback seriously. Over the years, Nerd’s Eye View reader feedback has shaped everything from the visual design of the blog (from its original dense small font!), to the ongoing expansion of our Members section from offering CFP to now CPE credits for CPAs and IAR CE for RIAs that can be earned by reading Nerd's Eye View blog articles, the launch of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, our popular "Master List" of all the major Financial Advisor conferences and Best Books for Advisors, and now the coming rebuilding of our Members Section by the end of this year (to be followed by a design refresh of our Nerd’s Eye View blog in 2026!).
So regardless of what kind of reader you are: an advisor or someone who works in an advisory firm home office, an individual consumer who reads this blog for your own benefit, a CPA, attorney, or another related professional that works with financial advisors, or you're associated with a vendor who serves advisors... I hope you'll participate in this year's survey. It's only 13 feedback questions, should take no more than a few minutes, and will remain open until the end of next week.
Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to access our Reader Survey below, and share your feedback! 😊
Launching a new business venture is often a creative – and somewhat vulnerable – act. Whether it's opening a new firm, publishing a book, or even just posting on social media, each public-facing offering reflects many hours of ideation, refinement, and effort. When preparing to launch, advisors must typically answer two core questions: "Who will show up for this?" and "Will the people who do show up like it and get it?" A good way to address both questions is to ask for feedback – but the real challenge is knowing who to ask, and when.
In the 161st episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how and when to ask for feedback, how to use it constructively, and when it's better to simply act and launch.
As a starting point, gathering a sufficient volume of responses is crucial when asking for feedback. Negative feedback often feels ‘louder' than positive feedback, but a single critical opinion may not reflect a broader sentiment – people simply have a variety of preferences. Advisors can mitigate overreacting to one-off responses by ensuring they collect enough responses to identify real patterns, which can also prevent an advisor from rebuilding everything in response to a single opinion. Furthermore, ensuring that feedback is coming from the ‘right' people is just as important. For example, if a firm launches a new offering for its core clientele – dentists near retirement – then it may not be helpful to ask newly minted doctors what they think of the offering. The doctors may not find the offering helpful or relevant… and that's okay. Feedback from outside the target audience may be interesting, but it isn't always relevant!
In some cases, behavioral data may also be a helpful source of useful feedback. Observing the topics and offerings that clients actually engage with may offer better clues about what they find valuable. Doing more of what connects – and less of what doesn't – can be an easy, effective way to refine offerings over time.
Finally, there may be times when the best audience to build for is the advisor themselves. Many advisors build firms with fee service models that resonate with them. At times, what's needed isn't feedback – it's confidence. For example, there may come a point where an advisor may not need feedback as much as a rallying cry to move forward. Then, once something is launched, the advisor can watch for how prospects and clients react to their offerings and take that as implicit (or explicit) feedback.
The key point is that feedback can be a powerful tool to refine offerings and creative ventures, but only when it comes from the right people at the right stage of the process. When thoughtful feedback comes from a core part of the audience, it can be a helpful resource for advisors to shape services that resonate with their target audience. And, ultimately, those points of feedback can help advisors build a stronger, more relevant product – amplifying their impact in the long term!
Financial advicers often market their comprehensive financial services as a way to differentiate themselves from other advisory firms and to stand out in the broader landscape of financial advice. These services may range from 'standard' offerings like retirement planning to less traditional areas like credit card consulting. In a firm's early years, there tends to be more room for experimentation, with advisors adding new services to provide value and attract clients. However, as a firm's capacity grows and its list of services expands, the focus often shifts – from asking how to do more for clients – to "How can I regain control of my time without reducing the value or quality of my services?"
The best roadmap for focusing an advisory firm will reflect how to do more of what clients value and scale back on what they don't use or appreciate. While advisors may make educated guesses about client preferences, this approach has its limits. Advisor often have different skills and perspectives than their clients (because if clients share the same inclinations, they might just be advisors themselves!), and it can be difficult to fully eliminate personal when evaluating clients' needs. One-on-one client calls can offer insights, but they're hard to scale and may unintentionally lead to biased responses.
A more efficient solution is an asynchronous client engagement survey, allowing clients to rate how much they value specific offerings. These surveys help advisors identify what to improve, what to reduce, and what to keep doing because clients enjoy it! Advisors can also gauge interest in potential future services, using that feedback as a compass for what to build next.
Beyond assessing service offerings, client engagement surveys provide advisors with an opportunity to gather feedback about other aspects of the business. Advisors can ask how much value clients feel they receive for their fees, how they perceive about the firm's overall responsiveness, and what the firm should stop or start doing. This detailed feedback can reveal unexpected insights into where clients are truly finding the most value!
In most cases, two weeks is enough time for the clients to complete the survey, with a few reminder emails sent while the survey is open. After the survey closes, advisors can evaluate the responses – what can they do more of? Where can they scale back? And which new business opportunities would clients value most? After some preliminary analysis, it's important to follow-up with clients, expressing appreciation and sharing at least one change the firm will make based on the survey results.
Ultimately, the key point is that client engagement surveys can be a powerful tool for advisors to identify what matters most to clients. They provide valuable insights not only on what to streamline but also on where clients are receiving the greatest value. Beyond improving efficiency, surveys demonstrate that the advisor values client input, strengthening relationships and enhancing satisfaction – which can lead to better retention and more referrals!Read More...
The traditional financial advisory firm is blessed with incredibly high client retention rates. Which doesn't change the fact that each and every client loss that occurs is still very painful. But mathematically, most financial advisors only have to add at most a handful of clients every year to maintain positive growth momentum. To the point that most advisory firms don't really need to worry "Am I providing enough value to my clients?" and instead can focus on delivering the value they already provide more efficiently and effectively.
Yet the reality is that client preferences can and do change over time. Sometimes services that were once valued highly (delivery of quarterly performance reports) are no longer so valid (I'll just check on my accounts from my smartphone when I feel like it). Other times the evolution of the client base makes new services more relevant (e.g., from accumulation planning to decumulation planning). You never really know… until and unless you ask!
Every year, we ask you – our readers – for feedback about what you want to make this website even better for you, to ensure we stay on the right track in adding value to the advicer community and making financial advisors better and more successful. And especially after the amount of change over the past few years, from the rollout of our Virtual Summits on Marketing and Advisor Value to our Kitces Courses on Tax Returns, Insurance, and Estate Document Reviews, and most recently, the launch of IAR CE in our Members Section… we're more eager than ever for your feedback about how we're doing, where we can improve, your thoughts about some new ideas we're considering, and your feedback about what else we could be doing to help the advicer community.
Because we really do take your feedback seriously. Over the years, Nerd's Eye View reader feedback has shaped everything from the visual design of the blog (from its original dense small font!), to the ongoing expansion of our Members section from offering CFP to now CPE credits for CPAs and IAR CE for RIAs that can be earned by reading Nerd's Eye View blog articles, the launch of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, our popular "Master List" of all the major Financial Advisor conferences and Best Books for Advisors, and turning our AdvisorTech Map into an entire AdvisorTech Directory that you can use to build your own tech stack.
So regardless of what kind of reader you are: an advisor or someone who works in an advisory firm home office, an individual consumer who reads this blog for your own benefit, a CPA, attorney, or another related professional that works with financial advisors, or you're associated with a vendor who serves advisors... I hope you'll participate in this year's survey. It's only 12 feedback questions, should take no more than a few minutes, and will remain open until the end of next week.
Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to access our Reader Survey below, and share your feedback! 😊
event feed
A few months ago, many of you were kind enough to complete a series of two reader surveys - one for the Nerd's Eye View blog, and another for The Kitces Report newsletter. In the coming months, I'm excited to announce that you'll be seeing the fruits of those survey results, in the form of a number of upgrades and improvements to this platform. The visual look of the blog will be modernized (yes, including an increase in the default font size!), the comment system will be replaced, and several enhancements will be made to the members section for newsletter subscribers. In addition, we will begin to offer periodic webinars for continuing education credit, and later this year the written content of the blog will be complemented by a new podcast.
You'll see these changes roll out incrementally in the coming months. For the time being, this is just an announcement of changes to come, with an important note that if you're using an RSS reader to follow the content of this blog, there's now an updated RSS feed link to use (as the details of this post explain, you just need to complete a simple update to your blog reader software to ensure you continue to receive new content in the future).
In the meantime, thank you to all of you who voted Nerd's Eye View as #1 in the recent Zywave survey of the top news sites and blogs for financial advisors!
As I come up to speed on the world of blogging, it is my goal to make it easier for all of you to read the content on this website. Accordingly, I have configured this blog's content to publish via FeedBurner, so that you can conveniently using any number of blog reader programs to keep up with new content.
Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 479th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today's podcast is Andy Panko. Andy is the owner of Tenon Financial, an RIA based in Metuchen, New Jersey, that oversees $323 million in assets under management for 105 client households.
What's unique about Andy, though, is how he has been able to add additional advisors to his firm (quadrupling the assets he manages over the past few years) while maintaining the strong level of work/life balance that he desires.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Andy decided to bring on two new advisors (creating additional business management requirements for himself) despite running a highly profitable solo practice that met his lifestyle goals, why Andy sought out mid-career professionals when making his new hires (due in part to their established professionalism, ability to operate independently, and the likelihood they would stick around for the long haul), and how Andy decided to set a client capacity of 60 households for himself and for each of his advisors based in part on his firm's tax-focused planning and meeting calendar.
We also talk about how Andy charges his clients on a flat-fee basis (with one price for single clients and another for couples), which is enabled in part by having clients who fit a similar profile (those nearing and in retirement who want tax-informed decumulation and retirement planning advice), why Andy decided to pay his advisors a highly competitive base salary (rather than combine a base salary with incentive compensation) that reflects the client workload they take on (enabled in part by knowing exactly how much each new client will pay in fees), and how Andy thinks the flat-fee model is a plus both for his clients (who receive a high level of service at a price point that is often less than they would pay on an assets under management basis) and his firm (which can easily assess the time and revenue tradeoffs of bringing on new clients and advisors).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Andy shares how he attracts a steady flow of prospects by creating educational content on his retirement specialization (creating a separate brand that's an outside business activity on his ADV), how Andy has overcome the loneliness that can occur from having a solo (or now, remote multi-advisor) practice by engaging with the advisor community online and at in-person events, and how Andy has succeeded in achieving his lifestyle goals in part by adjusting his workload in line with his outside responsibilities (for example, by intentionally maintaining a solo practice while his kids were younger).
So, whether you're interested in learning about growing a firm while maintaining strong work/life balance, hiring mid-career professionals directly as advisors, or using educational content to attract a steady flow of good-fit prospects, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Andy Panko.
Welcome to the March 2026 issue of the Latest News in Financial #AdvisorTech – where we look at the big news, announcements, and underlying trends and developments that are emerging in the world of technology solutions for financial advisors!
This month's edition kicks off with the news of Altruist's launch of a new AI-powered tax planning add-on to its Hazel AI notetaker, which triggered a big selloff in the stocks of established RIA custodians like Schwab, LPL, and Raymond James – but despite the media narrative that the volatility was a result of the threat of AI-driven disruption to the advisory industry as a whole, the real story (given that Altruist's tool was itself made for financial advisors) is about the threat that Altruist and its rapid technology innovation poses to other custodians, and how they might now see Altruist as a true competitor (even though they've been gaining momentum and market share on the back of their technology for years)
From there, the latest highlights also feature a number of other interesting advisor technology announcements, including:
- Jump and Zocks, the respective #1 and #2 market leaders in the advisor AI notetaker category, each announced Series B fundraising rounds, widening the gap in scale and capital between themselves and the remaining standalone notetakers – and suggesting that rather than being threatened by CRMs rolling out their own internal notetakers, the AI notetakers could instead be a threat to the CRMs themselves as they build out their CRM-like capabilities faster than the CRMs can respond
- FMG Suite has acquired Testimonial iQ, a tool that aimed to streamline the process of collecting and promoting client testimonials on Google Reviews – which in part highlights how advisor use of testimonial marketing has lagged in the years since the SEC revised its Marketing Rule to allow the solicitation and promotion of testimonials, making it hard for Testimonial iQ to persist as a standalone tool; but is also a story about how FMG Suite is aiming to cover virtually every part of the website-centered digital marketing funnel for advisors via its PE-funded acquisitions
- After a number of years where Holistiplan was the dominant tax planning software on the market, a slew of new competitors have recently arisen from both existing platforms (like Wealth.com, Nitrogen, and Altruist) and new startups (like Hive AI Tax and april) featuring AI-powered document extraction and AI-generated recommendations – which on the one hand could be troublesome for Holistiplan's incumbent stature if AI has erased the technology advantage it once had, but on the other hand could turn out to reinforce why Holistiplan became so popular to begin with (because it allowed for advisors to build the tax planning strategies they want to build, rather than feeding them recommendations they may or may not be comfortable giving to clients)
Read the analysis about these announcements in this month's column, and a discussion of more trends in advisor technology, including:
- The AI meeting support startup Contio (founded by Riskalyze founder Aaron Klein) has launched its new MeetingOS software, a three-part tool that generates meeting agendas, provides real-time talking points and client information during the meeting itself, and logs meeting notes and follow-up tasks after the meeting, all with the goal of improving client meetings themselves rather than just the work before and after – however, since the problem with client meetings is often too much (rather than too little) information and agenda topics, it's possible that a tool like MeetingOS could create an information overload that prevents the advisor from staying present in the client conversation (which undermines much of the purpose of meeting with the client to begin with)
- Max (formerly MaxMyInterest) has launched a new private banking service for RIAs with ultra-high-net-worth clients, giving independent RIAs an option to offer access to the kinds of services provided in-house by private bank advisors (without the need to refer to a private bank who might subsequently pitch the client on their own wealth management services)
And be certain to read to the end, where we have provided an update to our popular "Financial AdvisorTech Solutions Map" (and also added the changes to our AdvisorTech Directory) as well!
*To submit a request for inclusion or updates on the Financial Advisor FinTech Solutions Map and AdvisorTech Directory, please share information on the solution at the AdvisorTech Map submission form.
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