Between Now And Success

In a Nutshell: Delivering great service is table stakes. Drive toward extraordinary by creating a unique, emotionally engaging experience for each individual client. Guest: Julie Littlechild. Julie is a leading expert on the drivers of client engagement. She's also the cohost of the Becoming Referable podcast and the author of the book The Pursuit of Absolute Engagement. My Key Takeaway: To create an engaging client experience that becomes a magnet for new ideal clients: Be intentional about designing a discovery and planning process that engages your clients emotions and makes them feel more connected to you. Focus less on a prospect's assets and more on how they view themselves, then deliver an experience that is tailor made for who they are. Draw a distinction between service and hospitality ... and excel at both. Also Learn: 1. Why creating a client journey map should be an essential early step in thinking about your systems and services. 2. How to put your firm and its ideal clients to an "Authenticity T

In a Nutshell: In 2020, the most successful advisors have moved past worrying about "competing" with technology. Instead, they're finding ways to automate the 30 - 40% of the mundane tasks that are necessary for relationships but don't enhance them, so that they can focus on the human conversations that create real lasting value -- and more business. Guest: Matt Reiner, CFP® CFA®, the cofounder and CEO of Benjamin, "the world’s first A.I. assistant created for advisors by advisors." My Key Takeaway: Used properly, AI can do things human advisors don't need to be doing so that we can focus on things AI can't do, like: Build better relationships with our clients. Coach our clients on financial matters so that they make better decisions and feel more in control of their futures. Help clients clarify what their money is for and live their best life possible today, not just in retirement. Also Learn: 1. Why you need to start thinking about technology -- and AI in particular -- as your partner, not your enemy. 2. H

A single word or a short phrase could permanently change your life. When you were young, a teacher may have said something to you that forever altered how you viewed yourself—good or bad. Maybe a parent said something that still sticks with you today. Or perhaps a former boss made a comment that drives you nuts to this day—I’m in that boat! In a similar way, this “My 3 Words” exercise I learned from Chris Brogan is designed to empower you with 3 words that drive your actions and keep you on track to make this your best year ever. This is the sixth year now where I’ve begun the year by identifying 3 words that will set the course, give me direction, and totally excite me as I move through the year. I write these words at the top of my Daily Outcomes sheet and look at them daily throughout the year. The premise is simple. Pick 3 words that motivate you, remind you, and guide you on your road to making 2020 your best year ever. I encourage all my clients to do this and I encourage you to do this same exercise as

In a Nutshell: The largest financial advisory firms have developed consistent marketing programs that deliver a predictable stream of ideal clients...and there's just a handful of different ways to do it. Guest: Brad Johnson. Brad is the Vice President of Advisor Development for Advisors Excel. He's also the host of a great podcast for financial advisors called The Elite Advisor Blueprint. My Key Takeaway: To get your marketing machine humming: - Understand that marketing is NOT optional. Referral marketing is not enough. Choose from a list of five broad marketing buckets (with an infinite number of tactical ways to execute), and implement aggressively and consistently. - Marketing is math. Don't let your emotions distract you from the key numbers that will determine how and when a particular marketing initiative will pay off.  - Make practicing a practice. Once you identify the most effective marketing strategy for your ideal client pool, practice and pursue mastery of it.  Also Learn: 1. Why strong marketin

In a Nutshell: Shifting from being a financial advisor to being a financial coach could be the next evolution of how financial guidance is delivered and enable independent human advisors to remain profitable and relevant. Guest: Todd Tresidder. Todd is a former hedge fund manager who transitioned into a successful financial coaching career. Recently, he has adapted his coaching into a series of premium online courses on wealth building at Financial Mentor.  My Key Takeaway: In order to keep adding to your value proposition: -  Spend more time empowering clients and less on enabling them. - Help your clients find the path to the next step, help them always be taking that next step, and help them avoid the missteps that are in their path. - Consider getting formal training in how to coach people, from organizations like Coaches Training Institute. Also Learn: 1. How the act of gaining financial freedom doubles as a path to personal growth. 2. How a financial coach's services differ from a traditional financial

In a Nutshell: Clear career paths and offering a path to partnership and equity ownership are key ways to attract and retain next generation advisors and advisory firm leaders. Guests: Lisa Salvi is Vice President of Advisor Services at Charles Schwab, where she oversees business consulting and education offerings, including their one-on-one consulting engagements, the annual RIA Benchmarking Study, and other programs that support the development of advisor talent. Yonhee Gordon is a principal and Chief Operating Officer of JMG Financial Group just outside of Chicago, which has more than $3.0 billion in assets under management.

In a Nutshell: Whether you're writing website copy, sending email newsletters, social media posts, physical mailers, or a combination, you have to master the psychology of engagement to turn your prospects into clients and keep your business growing.  Guest: Adam Bensman. Adam is one of the top direct response copywriters and consultants in the country, and he has a particular expertise in helping financial advisors improve their marketing. My Key Takeaway: If you want win more business from your copywriting, you need to craft a compelling offer that: Differentiates your firm. Reaches your ideal client right where they are. Addresses the questions that are going in their mind. Provides a high level of perceived value.  Also Learn 1.  Why you should delete your glossy headshot from the top of your emails, open with an ellipsis (...),  and always end with a PS. 2. How to address your prospect's pain by appealing to the "search trigger" that brought them to you in the first place.  3. What 4 quadrants Adam say

The growth of United Capital is a fascinating case study in how being early on a trend, M&A, technology, financial life planning, and a charismatic leader all came together to create one of the industry’s biggest and most innovative RIA firms. Today, we’ll take a deep dive on this story through one of firm’s longest tenured employees, Matt Brinker. Starting at $0 in 2005, Joe Duran founded United Capital, and one of his early hires was Matt Brinker. Matt joined the firm when it had about $300 million in AUM and rode it all the way to $24 billion in AUM. He left after 13 years when the company was sold to Goldman Sachs in mid-2019. Most recently, Matt was the chief business development officer and head of acquisitions for the firm.

If you’re not learning faster than the world is changing, then you are going to fall behind very quickly. And businesses that fall too far behind usually don’t get a second chance to catch up. A big challenge for financial advisors is, how do you stay on top of everything that’s required to run a successful advisory business? As Josh Brown put it at the recent Wealth/Stack Conference, “A good advisor is both coach and quarterback, on-demand psychologist and personal friend, historian and futurist.” That’s an awful lot of ground for us to cover in our personal and professional learning. Plus, we have to track technological advances that are impacting our industry, while also adapting to best practices that help our businesses stay ahead of the competition. If you haven’t made a commitment to learning one of your top responsibilities as a CEO advisor, today’s episode will help you get with the program. My guest today is financial planner, author, podcast host, and speaker Taylor Schulte. Taylor is the founder o

When was the last time you talked to a Netflix employee about your account? How about an Amazon employee? I’m guessing for most of you the answer is: never. Netflix automatically charges my credit card every month and uses its algorithms to push content it thinks I’ll enjoy to my home screen. A shipping problem or return request with Amazon is usually resolved with a couple swipes or clicks. It’s efficient customer service, but it’s all faceless, online, impersonal. Now, when was the last time you stayed at a Ritz-Carlton or Four Season? How did that experience make you feel? Pretty darn good I bet! The key to your success as an advisor is to marry the tech efficiency of an Amazon with the deluxe service of a Ritz-Carlton and underpin it with high technical competence. It’s really a three-legged stool—tech efficiency + deluxe service + technical competence. I sometimes worry that our industry has become so obsessed with the tech efficiency leg of the stool that we are losing sight of what clients are really p

Email Marketing is one of the most effective, least expensive, and underutilized marketing strategies available to you right now. I’m on the record as saying a person’s inbox in the most valuable piece of marketing real estate you can own. When a person gives you permission to show up in their inbox on a regular basis, you can develop a personalized relationship that leads to new business and long-term loyalty. Now, you might be thinking, "Steve, have you lost your rocker here? Email is so 1990s. Why are you talking about email marketing? Email is dead. We've got Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, LinkedIn, texting, Instagram, webinars and much more, so why are you talking about a dinosaur like email?" Because it works! Just like I was early to the podcasting space five years ago when I started Between Now and Success, the next big marketing and education platform is a resurrection of an old one—email. I started using “electronic mail” back in the 1980s when I worked for corporate giants Caterpillar and Hewlett-Pac

A top-notch tech stack is table stakes. And you won’t “out tech the tech titans” so you can’t win on technology. So what can a financial advisor do to remain relevant and thrive in the years ahead? You can double-down on your ability to humanize the advisor-client relationship, to understand and deliver on exactly what your clients really need, and you should do it in a technologically-enhanced way. “You're not competing on your toolkit or the software that you deploy in your office,” says podcast guest Lex Sokolin. “You're competing on the core need, which is that most people don't have enough money. They don't know how to retire. They're super anxious. I think the smart financial advisor will shade the constructs of how they work and move towards what the human need is in this evolving world.” Lex Sokolin is the Global Fintech Co-Head at ConsenSys, a blockchain technology company building the infrastructure, applications, and practices that enable a decentralized world. Lex is also a futurist and entreprene

“You’re either growing or dying.” How many times have you heard that chestnut? Too many! But what if you decided you didn’t want to grow? What if you decided you’d be happy at the current size of your business and just add new clients when an existing client leaves or passes away? Does the thought of that idea make you vomit or is it liberating? If you decide it’s all about growth, what are you willing to sacrifice to scale? My guest today, Carolyn McClanahan recently decided her practice was “big enough” with 100 families and she has now closed her firm to new clients. Carolyn is the Director of Financial Planning at Life Planning Partners in Jacksonville, FL and she has a fascinating background. She's actually a M.D. who decided to become a CFP® after she and her husband couldn't find a financial planner who provided the kind of life-planning advice that they really wanted. After she opened her own firm in 2004, Carolyn split her time between advising some of her doctor buddies and treating patients as an e

The classic educational seminar still works if you spend the time, and yes, the money to do it right. My podcast guest today, Matt Gulbransen, has mastered the science—and art—of delivering seminars that convert.  Matt is the President of Pine Grove Financial Group, which is an RIA operating in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. In our conversation, Matt discusses what attracted him to seminars, what works for him, a few things that don't, the kinds of events he hosts, the formula he uses to calculate his ROI, and, maybe most importantly, the emphasis that he and his team place on rehearsing your presentations until not even a power outage is going to throw you off your game.

Today I’m going to share 3 maxims used by Navy SEALs that drive their elite performance. These maxims have been used by SEALs for decades and have proven their worth in thousands of Special Operations missions in every corner of the world. The good news is, they’ll work for you too. Apply them to your business and to your personal performance and watch your results soar. My guest today is Commander David Sears of the United States Navy. David retired after serving for 20 years in the Navy SEALs. He's a decorated veteran who planned, led, and executed hundreds of Special Operations missions in more than 40 countries on five continents. In our conversation we talk in-depth about three maxims that guide how Navy SEALs operate. Each maxim is so nuanced that once you dig into the surface-level truth, you’ll find deeper levels of insight that can apply to any kind of business – including, of course, financial advisory. I really love making these kinds of connections. I firmly believe that to be successful in any bu

Imagine for a moment if you could build a highly profitable practice that served a total of just 10 families and individuals. And through your personalized, indispensable service you could create clients for life, and perhaps even for a generation or two. That’s exactly what David Dunn is doing at Kingsbridge Wealth Management. David describes Kingsbridge as a family office featuring a “full stack financial infrastructure” that provides high-net-worth families and individuals with everything they need to manage their wealth. That means a thorough understanding of how each client thinks about their money, offering specialized services, and incorporating some outside-the-box thinking on asset allocation (hint: it’s definitely NOT modern portfolio theory). Even if your typical client’s net worth is in the 7-figures, as opposed to 8, 9 or 10 that David works with, you’ll gain a great appreciation of the psychological and service needs of all investors and how to apply that understanding to better meeting your cli

You’re not going to reach the top of this profession without having a competitive streak in you. And when you channel that competitiveness into “winning” for your clients and “winning” in the growth of your business, that’s a dynamite combo. Today’s guest, Michael Bapis, is a competitor who played golf for the University of Utah, then collegiate-level basketball while studying abroad in Greece for two years. After finishing school, he moved to Phoenix and ran Jim Flick's Golf School at Desert Mountain. Once he decided to follow his father into finance, Michael kept learning and achieving at a very high level, first at Morgan Stanley, then at HighTower. In 2018, he opened Vios Advisors under the umbrella of Rockefeller Capital Management, working with high-net worth individuals, pro athletes, and entertainers. We connected in person at the 2019 SALT Conference and discussed a wide range of topics including two key lessons he learned from his early mentor Jim Flick. These lessons became foundational cornerstone

I'm convinced that one of the keys to success is to have extreme clarity. But clarity can be difficult to define, and even harder to achieve. In our business, many advisors don’t do a thorough enough job defining themselves to an ever-more-crowded marketplace. “We help you achieve your financial goals” might fit well on your website’s masthead. But does a phrase like that really say anything meaningful about who you are as an advisor, what kind of value you bring to the planning process, and who your ideal clients are? To help us all achieve some … well, clarity on these important issues, I sat down with the “King of Clarity.” My guest today is Steve Woodruff, who is in the business of helping people discover their fit and then craft the words that become their verbal business card. He's also the author of a great book called “Clarity Wins: Get Heard, Get Referred.” In our conversation, Steve discusses the five questions he believes all business owners need to ask themselves about their branding and messaging

If I only knew then what I know now … As advisors and business owners, we all think about this from time to time. But how often do you actually put what you’ve learned into action? Right now, you’re probably sitting on a lesson or idea you could use to transform your business. In fact, you might have enough “A-ha!” moments stored up to do something really exciting, like starting your dream RIA from scratch. My guests today did just that. Dennis Morton and Katie Brown are the co-founders of Morton Brown Family Wealth in Allentown, PA. They used lessons learned during their previous 10-year working relationship at another firm to grow Morton Brown from $0 to over $100 million in AUM in just 12 months. In today's show, we discuss the specific ways they designed their firm from Day 1 to be an enduring business with no regrets and no more “if onlys.”

A master class from Sterling Shea on how to revamp your business and thrive as a world-class financial advisor, taught by someone who literally writes the book on where our industry is going and how the best of the best stay at the top.