...For Advisors

Episode 14: John Hill on Working With Physicians As Clients

“Well, I talked specifically about the idea that it was very difficult to build equity initially in a sole practice model. It was just not heard of. And so I think the accumulation piece was critical for these guys. You know, doctors have to live up to this understanding in the community that they make a lot of money and they live well and they have the biggest boats and they drive Mercedes and had the biggest houses. And quite frankly, a whole bunch of them did and put a hurting on themselves as a result of that. I think the challenges that we faced and where we had to focus early on and continuing until today, is getting the physician to really understand what their limits are, what they should live within, who they are, and how they have to prepare for that.”

Building a niche practice is a proven way to grow and build a reliable, stable client list and develop skills that allow advisors to serve a specific audience at the highest levels. In this packed half hour, we’ll hear how John Hill started approaching physicians after discovering that they were underserved, and in need of specific remedies and attention, using skills he realized he already had. Don’t miss this rare insight into the founding of one of the larger east coast RIAs and how it got there.

John Hill CFP®, founding partner and CEO of Pinnacle Advisory Group in Columbia, Maryland, who with his two partners, Ken Solow and Dwight Mikulis built a $2 billion advisory partly based on building a niche practice serving physicians. After graduating college with a bachelor's degree in economics and business administration, he ended up in the management fast lane at a major manufacturing company. He soon left his management position behind to pursue work in financial planning, was hired in a large institution where he met both his future partners at Pinnacle. In 1992, Ken and John resigned their position so they could start a firm in line with the vision to serve clients better without conflicts. The next year, Dwight joined them and Pinnacle Advisory Group was born.

Episode 13: Deb Kriebel on Gender Diversity in an Advisory Role

“. . . currently watching the women's World Cup soccer championships, and they've developed a pipeline where they're starting girls at a very young age. And I think we need to do the same thing with wealth management. And I've recently been involved with a program called Invest in Girls where we're starting to talk with young girls in high school about careers in financial planning or wealth management. So they need to know that it's actually a career option.”

Deb has long been a champion of gender diversity in the wealth management space, and lays out the numbers good and bad in this rare, tightly-packed interview. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from this gifted Advisor.

Deb Kriebel has been with Pinnacle Advisory since 1996, and was made partner shortly thereafter. She has a degree in chemistry from Penn State and an MBA from University of Florida where she nurtured her interest in things financial, prior to obtaining her CFP. Deb's been honored by "Investment News" as woman to watch in 2016.

 

Episode 12: Ginny Hudgens on Strategic Planning for Advisory Firms

“ . . . I think interest has always been high [in strategic planning] for advisors who understand our value proposition and understand the need to have a plan. It's interesting to me that advisors understand the vital need of their clients to do planning, but they don't see the need in their own firms. They don't necessarily put the two and two together. And generally their firm is their biggest asset. As you know, most small business owners have the majority of their wealth tied up in their firm. So even firms who do strategic planning should use an outside party, because getting staff to speak honestly with you about the challenges and the firm weaknesses is very difficult because you're the ones signing their paycheck. So in a lot of cases, you're just not getting good information.”

Like the cobbler’s children who never got new shoes, Financial Advisors do a wonderful job of planning their client’s financial futures, but often fail to plan for the success of their own practices. Strategic planning is a central tenet and best practice for almost any viable business of any size in other industries, but is only now finding acceptance among the solo practitioners and small ensembles of financial planners and wealth advisors. In this episode, Ginny Hudgens kicks open the door to the reasons why this is, how Financial Planners can easily embrace and benefit from some basic strategic planning exercises, and what small practices can do RIGHT NOW to get back on track and plan their own way to a successful practice. Don’t miss this intriguing episode of “ . . . For Advisors”!

Ginny Hudgens at The Strategic Implementer, based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, started out in the financial services industry in 1992 as a Vice President in the Investment Banking Group of J.C. Bradford & Co. In 2000, she accepted a position with a fee-only financial advisor, his only employee at the time, as the "jack of all trades". From a small advisory with less than $7M they built the firm to over $115 million. Ginny was responsible for managing all aspects of the firm, leading team strategy sessions and implementing the initiatives that drove the firm’s growth. In 2006, she founded The Strategic Implementer to share her skills with other advisors who are READY to take their business to the next level. A speaker and author, Ginny has written for The Journal of Financial Planning, Investment News and Bob Veres’ Inside Information. Ginny has a B.S. in Business Administration from University of Louisville.

Happy Thanksgiving from ...For Advisors

In lieu of our regular weekly program, we just wanted to give thanks to all our faithful listeners and subscribers, without whom this program would not be possible. We’re eternally grateful for your ongoing support of the program, and of our mission to bring quality information to Advisors across the country that they can use to help grow their practices.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday from all of us here at …For Advisors.

Episode 11: Dave Grant on a Roadmap to a Thriving RIA Practice

“A lot of it was content marketing. You know, as you start an RIA, you've got nothing but time on your hands if you're starting from scratch with zero clients. So a lot of it was understanding what problems I am finding in my own situation and writing about it. Writing is almost a form of therapy for me. I need to do it else I just go haywire. So I was writing a lot. I then started turning those into videos. I was then approaching school districts to say, "I've got all this knowledge here. I am guessing you don't have anyone in your district who is giving this knowledge back to teachers to help the m understand their situation without coming in with a product pitch as well." Some districts were very open to me coming in and doing seminars with a veil disguise of, "I do consult with teachers to help them with their situation, but there's no product pitches here either." And that's how I started to gain some of my early clients.”

If you’re looking for a growth path, and have clients with something unique in common, or some specialized expertise or insight, Dave Grant offers a roadmap for how to take those elements and turn them into a thriving practice. Don’t miss this high-impact half hour discussion of how Dave took a handful of teachers, some insight, some writing skills and some web savvy and turned it into something poised for continued growth and rising revenue.

Dave Grant of Retirement Matters, Inc. in Barrington, Illinois, earned his CFP® in 2007 and started retirement matters as a fee-only RIA in 2013 specializing in helping Illinois teachers and corporate executives turn retirement investments into a workable stream of income in retirement. Dave writes a column for Financial Planning Magazine and has won multiple awards for his work as a consultant with financial planning technology firms finds it rewarding to work with younger advisors, providing them with greater expertise in retirement planning.

Episode 10: Lauren Locker on How Eldercare Became Her Niche

“Well, I'll tell you the thing that surprised me the most, there was a group called the American Society on Aging, which who knew, right? There's a group for everyone. They have a conference every year. And when I went there, there was over 4,000 people that go to this conference just to deal with the aging issues. And I learned things there that actually, of all the places that I went to, really helped me the most. So yes, we thought, you know what? The baby boomers are gonna come in, they're gonna want to talk about their parents and what to do with them and how to do it, but in reality, it was the baby boomers who came in. Because the fact is it's really hard to force someone to plan for what's gonna happen in the future, so you'd have to want to do it yourself. And what really turned out to be the big thing was it really was a value add to our financial planning practice.”

Lauren Locker shows how she narrowed her niche in eldercare by combining personal experience and insight with practical expertise and additional education, to offer a strong value-added service that keeps clients and their families coming back year after year. Join us for an enlightening half hour of a directed journey to a rewarding practice niche that keeps on giving  . . .

Lauren founded Locker Financial Services, LLC in 1992. During her years in business, she has fulfilled her dream of helping people better understand how their money can work for them. Lauren is an independent Certified Financial Planner™ practitioner.

She served as 2012-13 National Chair and as past-president and past-chair of the Northeast/Mid-Atlantic Region of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA).

Lauren holds a B.A. degree in Business Administration from William Paterson University and is an active alumna is on the Board of the William Paterson University Foundation as well as an adjunct instructor at WPU’s Cotsakos College of Business. She has served as a panelist at the New York Times and The Record, and has spoken to student groups at Yale University and other colleges and universities in the tri-state area. Lauren is a member of the American Society on Aging.

*the "Aunt Carol story" is only intended to represent client circumstances and is for illustration purposes only.

Episode 9: Diane MacPhee on Projecting the Right Confidence

“. . . you want to cultivate a mindset where you do feel that your value is substantial and you stand in that value and you do it in a confident manner, but not an arrogant manner. And when you achieve that level, and you demonstrate that authenticity, these conversations, they go very well, you come across very calm and confident. And that is really more important to me than a technical skill.”

Every Advisor encounters a situation where they have to have a difficult conversation with a client, either about rates, or performance or fees or some planning issue that is challenging – and most advisors feel they can do better in this area. Diane MacPhee of DMAC Consulting shows you exactly how to change your mindset, project the right confidence and the right vibe to handle these conversations in a very straightforward and effective way that anyone can adopt with a little practice. Join us for a lively half hour of learning and exploring the various ways to ease these difficult conversations.

Diane MacPhee is a professional business coach, with DMAC Consulting working exclusively with the financial planning sector. Diane earned her CFP® in 1989 and operated a successful solo practice for 16 years, specializing in retirement planning for middle to high net worth clients. In 1994, she converted her practice from fee commission to fee only and achieved a whole new level of success. As a coach, Diane now focuses on enhancing clients business and their personal lives in a measurable and meaningful way. Diane offers clients a customized sales in business development enhancement program that helps clients identify, plan for, and achieve success. A sought after presenter, Diane has appeared on both CNBC and Wall Street week. She's been featured on Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, Consumer Reports, More, Fortune, and Ladies Home Journal. Diane served for three years as membership director for the National Board of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors (NAPFA), has presented at multiple conferences over the last 25 years on a variety of practice management topics.

 

Episode 8: Tim Riley on the Value of Active Management

“. . . our biggest focus was that just be able to see the same two or three studies cited again and again and again in support of this belief that active management was not creating value. And we just wanted to look and say, "All right, but we have all these other papers, and let's just take it to some more aggregate viewpoint." And if you take all 300 papers together, considering the quality of each, what conclusion would you come to?

Then what we found was that, you know, not that active management's great or active management's bad, just that there was clearly a lot more nuance to it than it's often portrayed in, you know, "The Wall Street Journal" or a lot of publications you see.”

Tim Riley, top researcher in the Economics Department at the Sam M. Walton School of Business has done a comprehensive review of the academic literature regarding the value that active management of equity portfolios adds to investor returns, to either validate or dispel the notion that passive portfolios perform just as well and the value is more in the relationship than the growth of the investments. Find out what his research revealed, and how to show clients the value you can add through actively managed funds and ETFs, in this exciting and revealing episode.  - Tim Riley, Assistant Professor, University of Arkansas, Sam M. Walton School of Business

Tim Riley is an expert and researcher in financial market analysis, specializing in performance assessments and risk assessments, studying mutual funds and the effects of active management as an assistant professor at the Sam M. Walton School of Business in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Tim completed his Ph.D. in finance at the University in Kentucky in 2014. After graduation, he spent two years as a financial economist at the U.S. SEC., where he worked on mutual fund liquidity regulation. His research is focused on mutual funds, hedge funds and other managed portfolios, and his work has been published in the "Journal of Financial Economics," "Financial Management," "Critical Finance Review," "Financial Analysts Journal," and "Journal of Empirical Finance," and of course "The Wall Street Journal," "CBS News," and Morningstar. In 2018, Tim became a CFA charter holder.

Episode 7: Chris Winn on Building Compliance Into Your Corporate Culture

“The best way for most advisors to deal with compliance is to really integrate it into the overall operations and workflows of the business. So identifying how you service your clients, how you maintain information, how your systems work, and essentially aligning a lot of those business activities with the normal operational flows of your business. Then in addition to that, there's obviously regulatory items that must be done, and those are the items that, you know, are often most thought of from a compliance standpoint. But we really like to make sure that firms are handling both of those so they're, you know, institutionalizing their processes and really weaving them into the fiber, their business, and then that covers a majority of the compliance and risk management.” – Chris Winn, Chief Executive Officer Advisor Assist

Advisors have had a long-standing love-hate relationship with SEC and FINRA compliance over the years as the practice of advisory has become an industry and a career. Chris Winn, of Advisor Assist, an outsource compliance advisory firm, shows us how we can learn to love compliance if we just build it into our business and our corporate culture, because it can actually provide guidelines for not only good corporate behaviors, but can save us time, headaches and a ton of money over time. Tune in to this information packed half hour to see how that could work for your practice . . .

Chris founded AdvisorAssist in 2006 to provide comprehensive support to elite advisory firms seeking independence and risk-managed growth. Chris has over 26 years of industry experience and has served in numerous operations, compliance, and leadership roles. AdvisorAssist has established over 1600 registered investment advisors with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and all 50 state regulators.

Episode 6: Marnie Hards CFP on Finding Her Niche

“I think that people tend to look for an advisor that they feel comfortable with and they can relate to. So, I did start with quite a few fairly young families. I had my first daughter in 2002 and my second in 2005. So I was in this place where, we were a young, married, couple with young children trying to plan for our own retirement, plan for our own college education funding and so those were the type of people who I attracted, people who were in a similar position to the one I was in.” – Marnie Hards, CFP®

Marnie founded Aznar Financial Advisors in 1999 after working as a financial planner with the Ayco Company and as an associate with PricewaterhouseCoopers and in corporate finance with Booz Allen Hamilton. Marnie has a Master's degree of Business Administration from Fairleigh Dickinson University and her undergrad in Finance from Cornell. Earned her certificate in financial planning January of 2001. Marnie's an active member in NAPFA, AICPA, and FPA. She worked with NAPFA on basic training aimed at teaching new planners the intricacies of developing a financial plan. Marnie has been quoted in "Kiplinger's Personal Finance" Magazine, "Ladies' Home Journal," "Investment Advisor" Magazine, "SmartMoney," and the "Daily Record," and is a frequent contributor to "The Star-Ledger." Marnie's been an adjunct professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and is a strong advocate of financial literacy and education in public high schools.

Identifying what commonalities your clients have among them, and discovering what problem they all have in common that you can solve is one of the simplest ways to create a niche practice. Marnie Hards not only niched her practice based on her own experience, she did it in a way that let her live a more fulfilling life, and still give more to her clients. Find out how in this intriguing half hour.