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 look for opportunities to innovate.
Charging a fee for assets under management certainly qualifies as conventional wisdom and we are starting to see advisors innovate in this area. Podcast guest James Osborne now charges a flat annual fee of $4,500 for money management and planning services regardless of account size. Brittney Castro charges a planning fee and a monthly subscription fee. And Scott MacKillop, founder of TAMP First Ascent, is capping his asset management fee at $1,500 regardless of asset size.
If you want to quickly gain visibility and new business, find a piece of conventional wisdom and be unreasonable enough to shake it up and find a new angle that appeals to a certain segment of your target audience.
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.
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 for assets under management certainly qualifies as conventional wisdom and we are starting to see advisors innovate in this area. Podcast guest James Osborne now charges a flat annual fee of $4,500 for money management and planning services regardless of account size. Brittney Castro charges a planning fee and a monthly subscription fee. And Scott MacKillop, founder of TAMP First Ascent, is capping his asset management fee at $1,500 regardless of asset size.
If you want to quickly gain visibility and new business, find a piece of conventional wisdom and be unreasonable enough to shake it up and find a new angle that appeals to a certain segment of your target audience.
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 notes.
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 question. Fortunately, Chamandy and co-author Ken Aber have created a roadmap to help you figure it out.
I strongly encourage you to order the book and learn more about Chamandy and Aber's process by visiting their website.
And click here to learn more about how financial advisor coaching through Belay Advisor can help you become “uniquely remarkable” and attract ideal clients.
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 Advisors.
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 to "do" something as opposed to passively consume something. Research clearly shows that humans value experiences more than things. Experiences bring us more happiness than do possessions. So, become an experience maker!
Third, big brands are moving away from interruptive advertising and creating an immersive client experience where the product is part of the production. If you watched the finale of American Idol, you couldn't tell where the commercial for Ford ended and the Idol show began--it was all integrated into one seamless production.
These forces make it imperative that you reimagine your client experience and make it one our clients want to remember and experience over and over again.
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 accompany this episode. I cover some of the highlights from this episode along with my color commentary.
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 topics including:
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:
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.
Your business success boils down to three things: 1) the right people, 2) building, selling and servicing the right product, 3) at the right price and cost structure to generate acceptable profits. In other words, it's about people, product, and profits.
The great auto executive and commercial pitchman Lee Iacocca got it right when he said:
In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words: people, product and profits. Unless you’ve got a good team, you can’t do much with the other two.
In today's show, I go through each of these areas and discuss specific things you can do to excel. Make sure you visit the website to read the full article and see a video of one of Iacocca's classic commercials.
After reading about a new digital platform for financial advisors that builds traffic on the other company's website I thought, 'This is not a good way for advisors to build their digital presence.' So, in today's podcast, I'm going to walk you through a three-step digital marketing strategy for building a digital presence that drives traffic to YOUR website, that builds YOUR leads pipeline, and that builds YOUR brand, not somebody else's(See my podcast: How to Build a Brand That Connects With Your Clients and Prospects).
There are so many platforms out there that rely on you to create content for them--for free--in order to build THEIR business. I'm thinking of Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, Advisor Insights from Investopedia, and many others. The trick is you have to be very careful with these other sites to make sure that you get a positive ROI on the time and intellectual capital you spend populating these other sites.
I'm not kidding when I say if you pay scant attention to your digital marketing and digital presence strategy, you're going to be history before you know it. All these platforms that have popped up in recent years are trying to grow by getting free content from you and then selling advertising to the platform user base. It's a great business because their cost of goods is like--zero. These platforms know the value of attracting lots of people to their system. You need to do the same.
Now, there is a time and a place for you to use these third-party platforms to grow your business. But, you have to be smart about how you do it. You have to carefully choose the third-party places where you post your intellectual capital and devote your time. And the ultimate goal of doing this is simple--you want to drive traffic back to your website, capture the leads, and start nurturing them to become clients.
Today, I discuss how to create a digital strategy that drives traffic to your website and builds your brand, not somebody else's.
Why are only 23% of CFPs women? Why are even fewer women in leadership roles? Why aren't more women entering the business? What can existing firms and leaders do to encourage more women to become financial advisors and help them through the tough early years? Those are just a few of the questions Eleanor and I discussed on today's show about how to hire and train women financial advisors.
All firm leaders and industry leaders reading this post and listening to this podcast have a role to play in encouraging more women to enter the business and helping ensure they succeed. Frankly, it's a great business for women. They possess certain interpersonal skills that make them ideally suited for the human-to-human nature of this work.
Unfortunately, there's a stereotype among many women that this business is all about sales and numbers. Sure, that's part of it, but ultimately it's much more than that.
When it comes to training women financial advisors, Eleanor said, "I think a training program has to make sure that she understands the timeline for advancement, the expectations for the role, the responsibilities, where she is going to be in the firm if she meets expectations in the next year, 2 years and beyond."
Hiring women makes good business sense. "Firms need to realize that having more women in a firm does very positive things to the workplace environment, to the culture, even the bottom line. Large companies who have put more women in leadership positions, management positions, really do have higher return numbers measured in a number of ways. It's just good business," said Eleanor.
Oh, and let's not forget, women may be slightly better investors than men, according to various studies.
Technology is changing at head-spinning speed and it's easy to get confused about which technology to implement and how to go about being profitably innovative. Betting the farm on a certain technology direction is usually not the best idea. But what can you do instead?
In today's show, I have a conversation with Lex Sokolin, co-founder of an early Robo Advisor called NestEgg, and now a partner and chief operating officer of Vanare. Lex gave an excellent talk at the T3 Technology Conference in February and we got together to chat about being innovative. (Also, checkout this profile of Lex at Wealthmanagement.com.)
We talk about the process of being innovative and how financial advisors can make good technology decisions without betting the farm. We also discussed James Altucher's process for coming up with ideas, lean startup methodology, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. It's a value-packed 25 minutes!
How do you influence people to take action? How do you get people to follow you, rally behind you, and take your advice?
Robert Cialdini wrote the seminal book on influence and I encourage you to read it (or checkout the highlights here). But in today's show, I want to share a few more tips that come from an article written by United Capital founder Joe Duran (see my earlier interview with him here), a conversation I had with one of my coaching clients, a podcast I did with professional speaker Michael Port, and from a book by Robert McKee called, "Story."
We all want to be more influential so we can help people take positive action to improve their situation. The good news is there are specific ways to do that and I share them with you in today's show.
If you have any questions or comments, please email me. I'd love to hear what you like and what you'd like to see improved about the podcast. Thanks!
It was a great week for podcast recording. I recorded several episodes with people from as far away as Sydney, Australia and as close as 30 minutes from my house. And each of them generated numerous insights and on today's show, I'm going to share 3 of them.
I close the show with a quote from Buckminster Fuller on how to make change. This quote is particularly relevant to the financial industry right now.
If you have any questions or comments, please email me. I'd love to hear what you like and what you'd like to see improved about the podcast. Thanks!
Can you get a true understanding of a client's risk tolerance and place them in a portfolio with the appropriate portfolio risk by asking a few simple subjective questions? Robo Advisors Betterment (see my interview with Betterment founder Jon Stein) and Wealthfront believe they can but today's guest, Aaron Klein, co-founder of Riskalyze, believes those firms have it all wrong.
Aaron's firm tackles the risk tolerance and portfolio risk challenge from a different angle by utilizing concepts borrowed from Prospect Theory. Prospect Theory was developed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and essentially says, "People value gains and losses differently and, as such, will base decisions on perceived gains rather than perceived losses. Thus, if a person were given two equal choices, one expressed in terms of possible gains and the other in possible losses, people would choose the former." Source.
We had a fascinating discussion about how investors deal with risk and we capped it off with some thoughts about the future of the financial advice business. Aaron has strong opinions and he has the smarts to back them up. Don't miss this episode with Aaron Klein of Riskalyze.
We all love great stories and in today's podcast I share some insights on why stories are better than facts when it comes to influence. You'll also hear my conversation with academy-award winning producer Ed Saxon, as we discuss the power of story.
But wait, there's more! At the T3 Technology Conference I also talked to Jay Jay French, a founding member of the popular band Twisted Sister. And you'll hear our conversation on this podcast as we discuss four ways to deal with setbacks. He also shares a story about Keith Richards that you won't want to miss. Fun stuff!
Jay Jay is a columnist for Inc. Magazine so he knows more than just how to get a crowd rocking.
This is a jam-packed episode filled with my takeaways from the T3 Technology Conference as well as interview clips from six industry leaders. I cover four themes that emerged from the conference including: enhancing the client experience, offering a client portal, delivering a quality financial planning offering, and using big data to make better business decisions and personalize the client experience.
In today's show, you'll hear from: