Penny was quoted in Financial Advisor IQ, “Advice for FAs Navigating Their First Bear Market.” Her advice for new Financial Advisors: “Put our egos aside and leverage the people in this business…” Read the rest of Penny’s advice and the entire article below.
Your client acquisition and marketing plan needs to be about much more than just your UVP and elevator speech. It should be almost solely focused on the UVP of the client.
Ask yourself and your team:
Advisors need to repackage their service offering and translate it into the language of Gen X and Gen Z.
Offering comprehensive wealth management service IS a unique differentiator… because most advisors aren’t actually delivering wealth management.
Many advisors dread having professional development conversations as it feels like a ton of work… for them. Advisors should create a culture of self-development, accountability, and self-awareness and encourage team members to own their own development.
Survey your clients to determine your marketing activities for next year.
Advisors often get overwhelmed with the thought of building a marketing plan and tracking its results. Rather than fret over the need to schedule marketing strategy sessions with your team, use your clients to determine the approach you will take on a quarter by quarter basis.
This year make it a point to send holiday gifts to your clients that are memorable, thoughtful and show your appreciation for their business and partnership. Below is our list of the 17 best and most unique holiday gift ideas that won’t break the bank and will have clients looking forward to another year with your firm.
Be known for something specific. Create a repeatable holiday experience for clients through your gifting. Clients will begin to associate your gift or special gesture with your brand and will look forward to your firm’s trademark token of appreciation each year. (Almost all the ideas on our list apply!)
Utilize your team. If you don’t have someone dedicated to client service or marketing on your team, consider hiring a seasonal intern to help with fourth quarter activities including planning a holiday event, client gifting and getting organized for next year.
Have a repeatable system. It’s not practical to send a personalized gift to every client every year. Consider separating the gift ideas above, into segments: all top clients will receive personalized gifts, all second-tier clients will receive a book of your choosing or a bottle of wine, all third and fourth tier clients will receive a holiday card only, so on and so forth. Use your CRM to stay organized and plan ahead.
When most advisors think about today’s millennials, they think about seventeen-year-olds taking selfies and posting on Snapchat.
The reality is, most millennials are now in their early 30s and stand to inherit trillions of dollars over the next two decades from their parents and grandparents. While they may still be taking selfies and posting on Snapchat, they are double the size of the baby boomer generation, incredibly tech savvy, entrepreneurial and in-tune with their finances.
If you are truly building a sustainable business, then yes, you must build a multi gen-team and durable operational infrastructure (see: our other blogs!) but you must also ensure that your brand narrative can transcend generations. Most advisor business owners have over looked this last piece.
Here are some of the things millennials care about: Sustainability, transparency, leaving the world a better place than when they found it, price, ease of doing business, authenticity, and creating fulfilling experiences for themselves and loved ones.
Here are some things millennials don’t care about: The fact that a business has been around for 150 years.
This is a generation that will choose the no-name-brand-product over the much more popular and traditional brand, if the former adheres to ESG principles or has better pricing for similar quality. This is a generation that vets products and services, not based on the rhetoric of a single company, but based on the reviews and opinions of the general public (i.e. other consumers.)
How do you ensure that your brand will connect to the next generation?
1) Craft a story that incorporates what the next gen cares about. Speak directly to them in person and via all print, digital and social channels. Talk about how transparent your firm is, the impact-investing capabilities you have, and the fact that you want to help them plan for tomorrow, but also live for today.
2) Allow the personas of team members to develop. Make sure you are strategically connecting members of your team with your clients. Consider segmenting clients not by just assets or revenue, but by interests and commonalities; assign team members with similarities ownership over a segment.
3) Create authentic content. The only way to truly stand out in a world of ghost written articles and generic content, is to develop a bold, genuine perspective on whatever it is you’re writing about. Use your words and any medium you have (LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram) to allow people to get to know YOU, your business, and your perspective on wealth management.
So, what’s your powerful next step? Engage the children of your clients (or your clients) in an honest discussion about your website, social pages, and marketing material. Ask for feedback on how you might be able to better connect to a different – but very important – sub group of clients.
Running an operationally efficient business today is exponentially harder today than it was thirty years ago. Technology and compliance costs have skyrocketed, wealth management services have become commoditized, and the current inheritors of wealth (women and millennial heirs) are leaving their benefactors’ advisors at alarming rates. Indeed, a bleak picture of what advisor-business owners are currently facing.
On the flip side, the advisors who are actively managing these challenges are positioned to thrive over the next 20 years — especially as wealth transfers and solopreneur advisors tire out. If you are one of these advisors, consider the following three powerful practice management initiatives for next year:
1) Evolve your service and fee structure.
The future holder of wealth looks, thinks and acts differently than the traditional wealth holder you are used to. I cannot stress this point enough. The one size fits all approach of “X% advisory fee covers all wealth management services” will no longer suffice. Advisors need to become more creative with how they hook younger-gen wealth holders who don’t have a lot to invest TODAY but have tremendous potential for tomorrow. Additionally, as fee transparency continues to be at the forefront of clients’ minds, providing simple-to-understand pricing structures that correspond to a clients’ point in the life cycle will be critical. Consider:
2) Be mindful of the implicit costs of service.
Time and time again I have seen businesses plateau because of capacity issues. Bringing on new clients each year will always contribute positively to top line revenue, but almost always has an adverse effect on operating expenses. Identify the hourly rate you and other advisors / client relationship managers in your firm are worth. Assign talent to the various tiers of service accordingly. No exceptions.
And for the clients who are simply no longer profitable to the business – even marginally – consider moving them to a digital service option and charging them only for advice on the go.
3) Create multiple sources of revenue generation.
Most advisory businesses generate the majority of firm revenue from a single source: the founder and primary rainmaker. Create a culture of revenue generation by teaching others to business develop and incentivizing ALL team members to generate revenue. Consider your revenue as the derivative of four sources: prospecting in your target markets’ circles (including digital and social), introductions from current clients, introductions from centers of influence, brand marketing (advertising, content generated by your firm, etc.). If you are the owner of the first source, allow others on the team to take full ownership of the other three.
Introduce these three initiatives into your annual business plan next year and track progress on next year’s P & L.