Between Now And Success

How do you build and manage a fast-growing billion-dollar RIA? What is the role of the CEO in this type of company? As the financial advice industry continues to evolve at a rapidly increasing pace, the role of the CEO becomes even more critical. Yet, as a business coach, I often see advisory firms struggle with making the shift from being an advisor-led firm to one run by professional management. Over the past few years, I’ve worked with and had dozens of conversations with leading advisors and CEOs of some of the industry’s fastest-growing and best run companies. While the group is diverse, I discovered seven common threads in terms of how they built and run their businesses. As an advisor, if you ever hope to make the jump from several hundred million in AUM to a billion or more, either you or a hired CEO have to step in and become—in title and in practice—the CEO. If it’s you as the advisor, then you’re no longer an advisor. You need to become a professional manager. Listen to the show to learn the 7 char

Financial education is hot and it’s a great way to build your business. Investopedia generates more than 20 million monthly unique visitors to its website by offering the public (and financial advisors) educational articles, Q&As, and videos. Ric Edelman built a $16 billion RIA by educating the public through books, seminars, radio and TV shows, podcasts, and newsletters. And I’m using the same concept to build Belay Advisor by educating financial advisors through my podcast, blog, webinars, and speaking. What are the strategies and tactics behind using financial education as a way to grow your business? How can you piggyback on Investopedia’s trailblazing digital marketing success to build your business? Today’s guest is Investopedia CEO David Siegel. David is one of the country’s leading digital media executives and has spent 18 years leading organizations through innovative product development, rapid revenue growth and traffic acceleration.

What's it like to climb Mt. Shasta with a hard-charging group of financial industry executives? What goes on behind the scenes to prepare for the climb and who made it to the top? And how do you deal with a major accident before the climb even starts? In today’s episode, I take you behind the scenes in the Skip and Chip Excellent Adventure 5.0. Skip Schweiss of TD Ameritrade and Chip Roame of Tiburon Strategic Advisors organize an adventure trip each year and this year's destination was Mt. Shasta in northern California. I participated last year and completed the 27-mile, 15-hour hike through four 12,500-foot high passes in the Rocky Mountains near Aspen, Colorado. This year, well, you'll have to listen to the story...

If you want to succeed in digital marketing, you can’t use yesterday’s strategies. Today’s most successful digital marketers take full advantage of the major digital networks and are creating content that is relevant, engaging, and share worthy. In today’s episode, I chat with Mitch Joel. Mitch is President of Mirum - a global digital marketing agency with over 2000 employees. Marketing Magazine dubbed him the "Rock Star of Digital Marketing" and called him, "one of North America's leading digital visionaries." He is also an author, blogger, podcaster, and passionate speaker who shares his innovation insights on digital marketing and business transformation to audiences around the world. Mitch and I discuss the strategies used by the country's most successful digital marketers.  

Note: This episode originally ran on July 18, 2016 Eli Broad is the billionaire founder of two Fortune 500 companies—Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home) and SunAmerica. You don’t reach that level of success by doing things just like everybody else does. Broad said ‘being unreasonable” led him to generate massive results. Listen to the podcast to learn 7 key business insights from his autobiography, The Art of Being Unreasonable, that illustrate how you can apply “being unreasonable” to jumpstart your success. Here's the first one. 1. In order to innovate, be unreasonable enough to ask fundamental questions about unexamined assumptions. Start by looking at the most fundamental operating principles of your business., what most people would call the basics. They represent the strongest, stickiest, and most unexamined kind of conventional wisdom. Broad said this conventional wisdom has often gone so long without scrutiny that they’re accepted as gospel. That's what makes these core assumptions the best place to loo

Eli Broad is the billionaire founder of two Fortune 500 companies—Kaufman & Broad (now KB Home) and SunAmerica. You don’t reach that level of success by doing things just like everybody else does. Broad said ‘being unreasonable” led him to generate massive results. Listen to the podcast to learn 7 key business insights from his autobiography, The Art of Being Unreasonable, that illustrate how you can apply “being unreasonable” to jumpstart your success. Here's the first one. 1. In order to innovate, be unreasonable enough to ask fundamental questions about unexamined assumptions.  Start by looking at the most fundamental operating principles of your business., what most people would call the basics. They represent the strongest, stickiest, and most unexamined kind of conventional wisdom. Broad said this conventional wisdom has often gone so long without scrutiny that they’re accepted as gospel. That's what makes these core assumptions the best place to look for opportunities to innovate. Charging a fee fo

When your clients sell their business, are you frustrated that you don't always add the resulting windfall to your AUM? There's a simple way to insert yourself in the sales process, add more value to your clients, and ensure you get your fair share of the proceeds to manage. One of the objectives of my podcast is to help advisors figure out ways to add more value to their client relationships that goes beyond money management. Today, we'll discuss how you can add tremendous value to your clients by helping them get top dollar for their company by selling to strategic investors. My guest is Rob Follows, Founding Chairman and CEO of STS Capital Partners. Rob is one of the world's leading mergers and acquisitions experts and his firm specializes in helping mid-market private businesses get maximum value for their companies by selling their business to a strategic--as opposed to financial--investor. If you have clients who own a successful private business, you'll want to listen to this podcast and read the show

You could be the smartest, most technically competent financial advisor in the country but without solid leadership and a marketing plan, you’ll be like the lonely Maytag repairman. Few RIAs have been as successful at building their business through good old fashioned business leadership and sophisticated marketing than Wealth Enhancement Group (WEG). This multi-billion dollar RIA has an impressive management philosophy and marketing machine that is firing on all cylinders. CEO Jeff Dekko’s early career was spent working for consumer packaged goods companies such as General Mills. In 2003, he joined WEG and has guided the company through tremendous growth. He’s rather unusual because he did not “grow up” in the financial industry and instead, brought a sophisticated outsider's perspective to building and managing an RIA. Listen to Wealth Enhancement Group CEO Jeff Dekko as we discuss leadership, marketing, and the future of the RIA business.  

Providing great customer service is no longer good enough. Today’s consumers are grading you on the “client experience” you deliver and how your client experience makes them feel. Customer service is just one aspect of the client experience and if you do not intentionally create a client experience that “wows” your clients, your business will quickly fall behind the national RIAs who are leading the way in creating national brands with consistent experiences. I recently moderated a panel at the FPA of Massachusetts annual conference and while the topic was ostensibly about Robo Advisors, it was actually about how to use Silicon Valley thinking to deliver an extraordinary client experience. This podcast is a recording of the session with Eric Roberge, Alex Benke, and Lex Sokolin that was moderated by me. By listening to this podcast, you’ll gain a deep understanding of Robo Advisors, the different ways to use them, and how advisors are using technology to enhance the client experience.  

The Envestnet Advisor Summit was packed with an agenda of top speakers and a multitude of sessions to choose from. And they capped it off with a closing keynote from Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer. Meyer’s talk was so good and insightful that I’m now a Buckeye fan—except when they play Wisconsin and Nebraska! Here are six of my takeaways from the event plus a bonus interview with Vestorly co-founder Justing Wisz. Make sure you listen all the way to the end as I ask Justin what was the most important thing he learned when he worked for mega-RIA Ken Fisher. His answer may surprise you. 

If a prospect asked you, "Why should I choose you?," could you answer it in seven words or less? In this world of short attention spans, you better be able to. The rap on financial advisors is they all sound the same. In the past, you could get away with that because there was so much business to go around and consumers were less discerning. Today, it's a much more competitive world and this means you must find a way to become "uniquely remarkable" or else resign yourself to commodity level income. Ian Chamandy is the co-author of the incredible book, Why Should I Choose You? He joins the podcast today for a fascinating look at how to answer the "why should I choose you" question in, get this, seven words or less. In fact, Ian says this is the most important question in business because answering it will shape every area of your business, not just sales and marketing. I run into advisors all the time who struggle with trying to articulate what makes them different and how to answer the why should I choose you

The top marketing people realize that when it comes to marketing the services of a financial advisor, you'll have better results if you purposely repel a significant segment of the population. Most of us want to be liked by as many people as possible so the thought of gearing our marketing to repel potential clients seems ridiculous. But one very successful advisor at the Barron's Top Independent Advisor Summit has built a top business by becoming the recognized expert for a select type of clientele. That's just one of the many takeaways from part II of our roundtable discussion with attendees from Barron's Top Independent Advisors Summit. Our goal was to pull out the key takeaways from America's top advisors and deliver Actionable Intelligence to you. See here for part I of the conversation and the detailed blog post I wrote covering six key takeaways from the first day of the conference. The roundtable participants were Jack Davis of Navigation Retirement Group, and Bill Keen and Matt Wilson of Keen Wealth

America's top advisors gathered in Scottsdale, AZ on March 21 - 23 for the annual Barron’s Top Independent Advisors Summit. I held a roundtable discussion with three top advisors who attended the event and our goal was to pull out the key takeaways from America's top advisors and deliver Actionable Intelligence to you. The roundtable participants were Jack Davis of Navigation Retirement Group, and Bill Keen and Matt Wilson of Keen Wealth Advisors. This is part I of a two-part podcast. Make sure you visit www.belayadvisor.com to read the article that goes along with this episode. 

Financial advisors used to get paid for managing money to help clients safely reach their retirement goal. Going forward, financial advisors will get paid for creating a client experience that shepherds their clients through a lifetime of experiences and transitions that taken together, add up to a life well lived. In today's podcast, I touch on a major shift I see happening in the industry. The shift is from the destination (retirement) to the client experience (here and now). Three forces are coming together to give rise to this shift from the destination to the client experience. First, as the millennial generation becomes more pervasive in society, this idea of retirement gets obliterated. Most millennials will never stop working. Instead, they'll seamlessly blend their work and life to create a way to make money and have fun at the same time. Second, events such as The Color Run, Tough Mudder, Comic-Con (and the hundreds of other "Cons") are stoking our interest in a live client experience that allows us

I’ve always taken the attitude that you’re never too smart to learn or too good to improve. So even though I get paid handsomely as a professional speaker, there’s always room to become better. And at a recent Master Class with top professional speaker Michael Port, I picked up three excellent speaking tips when he critiqued my performance. Michael was a guest on my podcast (Read the show notes/listen to it here) and I was looking forward to meeting him in person at the Social Media Marketing World Conference where he was a featured speaker. We met and I got to practice my speech at during his workshop and here are three key tips he shared with me. These are speaking tips that can help you too.

Ric Edelman is one of those rare people who can make bold, provocative statements AND have the experience and track record to prove that he’s not just blowing smoke. If you ask industry people who has been the most successful financial advisor over the past 30 years, Ric Edelman would likely top the list. Starting from scratch in the 1980’s, Ric built a juggernaut with 30,000 clients, 125 financial advisors, 500 employees in 42 offices, and $15 billion in AUM. When I asked Ric what the next 10 years looks like, he said, “10X. Add a zero to everything.” What’s even more impressive than the raw numbers Ric has generated to date is how he did it--through organic growth. Ric leveraged his journalism background and became a massive media star spanning multiple bestselling books, a nationally syndicated radio show, and a popular television show. Through educating the public, Ric Edelman gained trust and the clients followed by the thousands. Be sure to visit BelayAdvisor.com and read the special article I wrote to

Knowing what you know now, what would you do over if you could restart your business today? I posed this question to 6 successful advisors and their answers were insightful. And here's the funny thing, you can implement these ideas now and benefit from their hard-fought mistakes. You'll also hear my color commentary on each of their do overs.

How well are you using advisor technology to automate your business, augment your work as an advisor, and segment and personalize the value you deliver to your clients? Have you thought strategically about your business model and how you use technology to support it in a profitable way? In today's show, I chat with Michael Schrage, who is one of the world's most provocative thought leaders on innovation. He's also a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, a columnist for Harvard Business Review, Fortune, CIO Magazine and MIT’sTechnology Review, and the author of multiple books. Perhaps no one knows more about how to maximize return on investment from innovation processes than Michael. I first became aware of Michael nearly 20 years ago when I read his article, The Relationship Revolution. In the article he said we should think about technology as a way to enhance relationships, and not just a way to add value to information. It stuck with me. Our conversation covers several topi

Financial planning as practiced today is going away and will be replaced by an entirely new way of interacting with and delivering value and connection to clients. The days of offering a free financial plan in order to snag AUM are done. In today's show, I chat with Phil Cunningham, CEO of Advicent, the global provider of SaaS technology solutions for the financial services industry. You may know them better through their products including NaviPlan®, Profiles™ and Figlo™ financial planning tools, the Advisor Briefcase® marketing tool and the Narrator™ application builder. Advicent has about 100,000 advisor clients across North America so Phil has a bird's-eye view of what's happening in the fintech space. Our conversation covers the spectrum including: The changing role of the financial advisor (See: Going beyond money management to make a deeper client connection). How advisors can stay relevant and add value. The impact of technology on the client experience, managing your business, marketing it, and advi

Tony Robbins, a peak performance strategist, entrepreneur and bestselling author and Peter Mallouk, the #1 independent financial advisor in the country have joined forces to offer comprehensive planning services to clients with a minimum of $50,000. In today's podcast they explain how they came together and what they hope to accomplish. We also talk politics, the fiduciary standard, why advisors need to be a practical psychologist, the disastrous 401(k) industry, how Mallouk grew his firm from about $50 million in AUM to roughly $18 billion today, and we even mention the Showtime series Billions. It's a packed episode you won't want to miss.