Ep 39: Price Trumps Niche for Firm Growth featuring Angie Herbers – Episode 39

Episode 39 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). (38:35)

Episode 39 of Rethink Financial Advice, co-hosted by Derek Notman, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Couplr AI) and H. Adam Holt, CFP® (Founder & CEO, Asset-Map). Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or Acast.

Episode Summary

Angie Herbers joins Adam Holt and Derek Notman to argue the opposite of standard growth advice: that advisory firms should not niche in order to grow, and that price is the more powerful lever. Her comparison is to law, where practitioners begin at a modest hourly rate and raise it as they get better, with profitability compounding once referrals build. The hosts test the idea against their own histories and both concede they had no niche at all in their early years. Notman describes driving three hours to write a ten-dollar-a-month policy, and Holt recalls earning eleven thousand dollars in his first year and not seeing real growth until year eight. Herbers also identifies talent as the industry’s dominant trend, with firms shifting from generalist advisors toward specialists. The line the hosts keep returning to is that price is a commentary on value.

What this episode covers

• The contrarian case that niching is not what actually drives firm growth
• Price as a signal of value, and the legal profession’s pricing curve as a model
• Why both hosts grew without a niche, and what eventually made them want one
• The shift from generalist advisors toward specialists inside firms
• Making the client the quarterback of their own financial life rather than an advisor

Full Transcript

Machine-generated transcript of this episode.

Welcome to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast. My name is Adam Holt. And this is Derek Notman. We are your hosts, both veteran advisors and FinTech CEOs who challenge the status quo, question everything and have fun doing it. Hear honest commentary on the challenges facing advisors today. And be part of a community where we can all rethink the profession. Now on to our episode. Derek, did you niche early on to grow your practice? Adam, that really brings back some unpleasant memories of my early careers as an advisor. What do you mean? Your early memories were bad or? Well, being an advisor, especially in the first couple of years is really, really hard and really stressful.

Uncertain paychecks, crazy hours. I mean, we’ve talked about this before. And so we’ve talked so much about niching and I do believe it’s important. But if I reflect upon my early years as an advisor, I had tremendous growth. I grew like crazy exponentially over my first three, four or five years. And looking back, I didn’t niche at all. I was working with anybody that would fog a mirror and then would ask for a ton of referrals. I was persistent. I would drive three hours to write a $10 a month term policy. I would do anything. So no, I didn’t niche. And it’s interesting because it did lead to some growth, but then I got tired of driving three hours for a $10 checkout, as we call them.

I wanted to be able to become more laser focused and have more time and all that. So it’s an interesting question. How about you? No, of course not. I worked with all humans, whether they had a paycheck or not, whether they had a rollover or not. I did all lines of business, mutual funds, annuities, life insurance, all that stuff. That’s how we compensated ourselves. The only niche I would think that I adopted was basically planning first in every engagement. I would use some form of needs-based analysis to justify, because I was not a good sales person. I could not just walk in and sell. I did not have exponential growth.

I did not see exponential growth in my business until year number eight. I survived. I barely survived. In fact, the first year, I remember I made $11,000 my first year in 1998. I was living at home. I was paying my mom rent, which was not easy at $11,000. Good for her for charging you though. Yes, I know. That was her life lesson. Thanks, mom. I didn’t have enough money to go outside to stay at home. But of course, I was motivated, right? Get to work. I made a little bit of money my second year, but it was really because I focused so much on planning and I had really long sales cycles, but definitely no niching.

But here’s the irony of this question, Derek. Everyone is talking about how you need to find your niche. Who are they talking to? You and I are included in that batch of everyone telling people to niche. We’ve said it plenty of times. And I would say, and I hope I’m not contradicting something I said in the past year, which I’m good at doing that. I do it to my life all the time. Not like it’s recorded or anything. Well, but I would say if you’re, I mean, early on first couple of years, I would say don’t listen to the whole niching advice as much. However, keep it on your radar because it is eventually a place you’re going to end up or will want to end up most advisors that do.

So yeah, I would say that we don’t want a six month advisor to be worried about niching right now. They don’t have that luxury. It’s true. There’s so much conversation in the business around going directly to fee-based, going right to financial planning. Early advisors really have not built the credibility yet. How do you know what niche you want to be? Unless you came from a specific market, this is a second career. Maybe you were a pharmaceutical or a physician, or you were working construction or you were a business owner. I can see how generally your marketplace is going to be mindful of who you know and that’s probably where you’re going to start.

But very much our early businesses kind of get put together scrappily based upon who’s willing to do business with us in the early years. But this came up in a conversation with Angie Herbers. And if you don’t know Angie, she’s incredibly well known and she’s been involved for 20 years in our space. And I’ve run into her a couple of times and the people that work for her, she’s consulted thousands of firms, different sizes. So she’s all across the board and her team, very high end in terms of their guidance and their research around what’s working today. And she said something in a conversation with Derek and I that just got us thinking.

And I really, I hope that everybody gets to listen to this speed rethink tank interview with Angie Herbers. Are you ready, Derek? Yeah, let’s do it. She totally embodies the rethink mentality here. So definitely pay attention folks as you’re listening to this awesome conversation. Thank you, Angie. It’s great to actually have you on this podcast. You know, Derek and I have seen you for the past 20 years since we’ve been in the business working with advisors, literally thousands of advisors now in helping them grow their practice and address the real pain points as a consultant. So thank you so much for being here. We wanted to ask you what’s your perspective of the financial advice market today?

Well, that’s an interesting question because the great benefit of our perspective at Herbers and Company is that we get to be in leadership rooms and strategy rooms long before trends actually happen. We’re seeing the trend in real time and then the industry sees it three years later. My biggest concern right now is what’s gonna happen when consumers don’t want all their money managed at one firm. So what we’re seeing today is, you know, just focusing on consumer and consumer behavior. They’re saying, why do I need just one financial advisor? Why can’t I have several financial advisors? Why can’t I have some of my money at one firm and some of my money at another firm?

We’re starting to see a major trend toward firms working together on one client, firms specializing in areas and clients not having all their assets in one place. So it’s exciting to see this development happen. Along those lines then, Angie, it sounds like you guys are way ahead of the curve in what changes are coming down the road for all of us. So is there a missing opportunity or some type of challenge that’s coming up for advisors because of what you’re seeing? It sounds like your crystal ball works a little bit better than the rest of us. Well, yes, I mean, the independent advisory industry is growing very rapidly.

Pretend your clients now understand what the industry provides and what the industry is starting to tap into is the do it yourself investor. So how do you allow a client to, to some degree, do it themselves, manage their own money, but help them with advice when they need it and allow also those clients to get differing perspectives from other financial advisors? That is almost an entirely complete shift to how we’ve seen financial advice in the past. Financial advice in the past is you go to one advisor, you put all your assets at that one advisor, you get all your advice from that one advisor. I think in the next decade, we’re going to see the industry scatter a bit.

In other words, consumers, the do it yourself consumers are going to come to the industry and say, we want a piece of a lot of different firms. We don’t need everything at one firm. And that’s a different business model, different way to do things. Do you think that it’s because the consumer is getting different contextual advice or expertise? Is the argument that they’re getting investment, insurance, tax, legal from different sources and they want them to collaborate? Or is it that they’re getting investment advice from two separate entities in this model? I think it’s both investment advice and financial planning advice from two separate entities. I mean, you’ve got one firm that has one investment philosophy and another firm that has another investment philosophy.

How does the consumer know which investment philosophy is the better? So you test them both out. You have part of your assets at one firm, part of your assets at another firm. You get financial advice from one advisor, you go to another advisor, you get a second opinion, you go to another advisor, you get a third opinion. You diversify your financial advisors. That’s what the future is. That’s profound. I don’t know how I think about it yet, but I’m definitely gonna rethink my whole perspective on that. Assuming that’s correct though, Angie, assuming that that is the direction that we’re headed, what would be some action steps or advisors listed today be like, oh, that could disrupt the heck out of my business.

So what are some things, maybe, I don’t know, top two, top three things that advisors could do today to start getting ahead of that curve so they’re ready for it and ready for that fractional advice, if you will, versus where they are today? Well, that gets us into trends of today. Biggest trend today is a talent trend and no longer are we seeing journalists, financial advisors. We are now seeing specialists. So you may know how to do comprehensive financial plan, but you might be the insurance specialist or you might be the investment specialist or you might be the education specialist or you might be the retirement small business owners.

So within each firm, they’re going to have specialists in the future and that’s gonna be dependent upon talent. Biggest trend that we’re seeing right now is in talent. Talent, financial advisor talent, used to generalist financial advisors and while there are components that are needed for you to be a financial advisor, we’re starting to see firms move toward more specialist advisors and that is the big, that is how we’re gonna accommodate this, getting advice in multiple places versus getting all of my advice at one firm. So the big issue is how do we build the best for the best specialist? That’s really great. So I’m really curious, Angie, given the amount of consulting you’re doing and being in these back rooms and talking about what’s happening next before it’s published certainly, is there anything that you think that our community needs to hear?

Yeah, I’m just gonna warn you, this is a very controversial topic. I’ll probably get a lot of backlash from it but I don’t believe that advisory firms to grow should niche out right now and I can back that up. So along the growth track, what we’re seeing in the industry studies is that the niche is what drives the growth but if you’re very deep into that and that’s what Herbers & Company does, we get very deep into organic growth. We figure out how those firms can oftentimes grow faster. What we’ve learned is that the startups don’t actually grow by the niche, they grow by cutting price.

So they start, they have a lower price or even some free service that they offer, they gather clients as they grow along, then they start to see one client referring another client and referring another client, the niche develops and then they raise the price. So the niche is actually the lagging indicator not the leading indicator. The leading indicator is price, they’re competing on price. We don’t see firms grow specifically on the niche or focusing on the niche, we see them grow the fastest when they compete on price and then once they get bigger, they raise those prices and they just happen to have a niche.

That’s really interesting. Oh my gosh. I almost feel, Derek, I almost feel like we have to ask more questions here. Angie, can you drill down a little bit more on that because you’re gonna blow up a lot of people’s minds when they hear this statement. I know, I’m gonna get a lot of hate mail. I don’t know about the hate mail but like what are you doing Angie? Even Adam and I ourselves have talked about niching. So like this is definitely against the grain and I wanna know more. Yeah, I mean the question I have is, just to summarize what I think you said, but you’re saying that when you’re growing a practice, especially in the early days and maybe that’s the nuance here.

In the early days of growing a practice, your goal is to grab market share. The best way to grab market share potentially is to compete well on price to value. Correct. And by doing so, you will attract more of the potential market share and then as you get large and you’re looking for efficiencies, you can afford let’s say a Pareto principle where you go to 80-20 and that’s when you start either raising prices and by nature of that, cutting those that won’t stay with you because the value proposition is not there. Yeah. Well, your business school has a lot to play into this, but let’s just say you’re a startup out there and every marketer out there is saying pick an edge.

Well, that’s not how it actually happens. How firms are growing the fastest is they’re competing on price. Go back 20 years and think about the independent advisory industry 20 years ago. 20 years ago, everybody offered free financial planning. It was the loss leader, right? And then as the independent advisory industry grew, they started to charge for financial planning. Nobody was talking about niches as much as we talk about them today. 20 years ago, they were talking about offering free financial planning. They were competing on price. The same things happen today. If you’re a startup out there and you really wanna grow quickly, let’s just say you wanna get 100 clients, then cut the price in half.

You cut the price of investment management or the flat fee that people are paying, which is what most startups do. They cut the price. And then they get up to 100 clients. Those 100 clients start referring clients that happen to be the same type of client that they’re working with. So let’s just say they have five teachers and then all of a sudden they have now 10 teachers and 20 teachers and 30 teachers because they cut the price in the very beginning and all of a sudden they have a niche. So then you get even bigger. So let’s just say your goal is growth. If your goal is growth, you would never cut the bottom unprofitable clients because those are potentially your future cashflow.

You would just serve them unprofitably. So you start to grow and you start to grow and you continue to add clients and you continue to add clients. Well, naturally you’re gonna add clients who are referring other clients who are just like them and a niche develops. So then everybody talks about, oh, it’s the niche that grew us. No, it wasn’t. It was the free financial planning that grew you. It’s the cutting the price in the very beginning that grew you. It’s the referrals that grew you. It’s not the niche. So if you wanna grow fast, just cut your price and then raise your price later after your niche is developed.

Such an interesting take on growing an advisory business. It’s almost like that first 100 clients or whatever. It’s like you’re bootstrapping. It’s your start capital. You’re willing to make less now knowing you’re going for that hockey stick approach later. The hockey stick approach works so long as you do it correctly and focusing on the niche is still a lagging indicator which everybody thinks it’s the leading indicator. It’s not the leading indicator. If you get deep into those firms who are growing the fastest, look at all the big firms out there that got over the last 15 years. They were doing one thing for free and they were cutting their prices in the very beginning and it’s still true today.

So the whole niche argument only comes after you’re an established firm and your growth rate slows down. Well, your growth rate probably slowed down because you raised prices too fast. Is it that you’ve lowered the price or that you’ve increased the value relative to the traditional, let’s say market price? Because in my own practice, we delivered financial planning for free, like you said, and we grew enormously. But it was because of the planning process that we argued we uncovered more assets. So we gathered more assets per customer, thereby justifying, like you said, a loss leader, that the planning was actually a fantastic sales process. We didn’t actually wind up charging for financial planning at all because it wound up being actually a detriment to our growth, right?

If you start to charge for it, in some cases, now this is not every case, but in some cases, depending on the client, if you start to charge for it, then you’re weeding out the number of clients that you can potentially attract. And at that point, probably be a good idea to start niching. Right, so you’re saying that niching is something you do once you already have the base. That’s really the important part, right? Well, niching is something you do when you have a growth problem in the industry. But if you truly want to grow, then generally it has something to do with price or a free service or a loss leader or some specialty in service.

It’s not finding pilots or finding just people who want equity planning or finding only teachers. If you want to give your firm a shot of steroids, then start offering something of great value free, put a loss leader in place, or cut your price for a certain segment of clients and get your future cash flows. You get a lot of clients coming in, maybe not profitable, but you get a lot of clients coming in who start to generate a lot of referrals. And then those referrals then create the profitability later on. It all compounds. Just let the compounding happen. But too many people focus on, let me go find a niche and just focus on that niche.

Could it be said that an advisor should never niche? Well, I would never say never. I mean, if an advisor says, I only want to work with teachers because I really love teachers and they get underserved, then I’m gonna say, we should definitely niche on teachers. But if you want to have growth and a sustainable, consistent growth rate, then I wouldn’t focus solely on teachers because financial advice can be applied to every single consumer in the US. One needs a financial plan. You can do the financial plan for everyone. So by nitting out, in some cases it can hurt you. But if your goal is fast growth, find the service that really defines you, offer it for free.

And in the future, you will gain future cash flows. Or if you’re just starting out, just start out on a lower price. It’s no different than attorneys. It’s no different than accountants. When attorneys start out, they aren’t charging $800 an hour. They’re charging, I’m guessing, but they’re charging $200 an hour. And as they get better and better and better, they increase their price over time. And then the profitability starts to compound after they start to get a lot of referrals. Yeah, I see you’re buying a future business. I think the comment about saying I can work with competitors, I’m really curious about the collaboration. It’s funny, both Derek and I are working on tech projects that actually address that specifically because we didn’t really see anybody else talking about this.

What’s cool, Adam, what you’re making me realize is what you just said about AssetMap and couplers doing the same thing is that something you said earlier, Angie, maybe question like, well, who’s gonna be the quarterback? Normally it was the life insurance agent or it was the CFP who was the quarterback of the client’s financial situation. Why not make the client the quarterback? That’s who it should have always been. I love that she threw that in at the very end because we are starting to see that trend and that wrapped it up. The client should always have been the quarterback, but they haven’t been empowered for that one.

They haven’t and we’ve mentioned this in previous episodes. The access to information now because of the internet and whatnot is so great and so transparent that they are empowered to be the quarterback and they should be, it’s their money, it’s not ours. That’s right. So we should be helping them. That’s a service business. I love that conversation. I’ve got some great thoughts. And the thing that strikes me, Adam, so like me, like you, I’ve got a couple of things going on and- I’ve heard. I still have my RIA and even on my website, I am not accepting new clients. But if I wanted to jumpstart the next level of growth for my firm, I would seriously consider what Angie is talking about and just discount my pricing or offer some type of free thing to just get it to rock and roll.

If that’s- I don’t have the time for that. I’m not gonna do that. If there’s an advisor listening that wants to do that for me, reach out. There you go. But that’s- I just don’t have that capacity at this point, but just it’s refreshing to hear the other side. What’s your impression? What are your thoughts? I’m all over the board on this one. I have written down several things that I do wanna share, but on your comments alone, I think why we originally responded to this thinking, what, like really? And why she even said that she was gonna get hate mail is because the audience of financial advisors out there are those of us who have survived past those early years.

And as a result, the audience is a bit mature, right? So most of us have been in the business 10, 15, 20 or years or more. We’ve created some level of success. We have the luxury of being able to niche and we do so because we want to create more lifestyle, not more revenue per se. We wanna create more intentionality of that ideal customer. We wanna work with certain people that we like, and we only wanna add two, three, four high value clients a year. And we don’t wanna get overwhelmed. So we’re not trying to do the Kmart special where we’re basically gonna get into 100 new people somewhat profitable or not.

But here’s the interesting thing. When I rethought about this and listened to it again, I heard what you said, which was this is what startup companies do all the time. We go and get market share first, make them a client first and go do it. But the reticence towards it is that most advisors I don’t think really wanna grow like a hockey stick. They wanna grow more intentionally. But the misnomer here is that they should be bringing on the next generation and enabling them to go grow like a hockey stick and take their firm as a group. If you feel like you have a succession plan to the next level, that’s where I really think this has a lot of merit for all you experienced advisors who are thinking, yeah, it’s kinda like me.

I’m already niched. You know, that’s interesting. So even if you are an established advisor and you’ve been thinking, oh, I’m only gonna grow selectively, why not grow with Angie’s model, but bring on some advisors to take on that business? That’s right. It solves a succession planning situation potentially. It helps you grow. You’re gonna get a piece of that business anyways. It’s a really interesting way to do it as long as you’re providing that massive value. Heck, even my comment about my own firm, like that would work. Mm-hmm. I could see that. That’s a really interesting point. This is why established advisors should care just as much about this as if you’re six months in.

Yeah, well, it’s an intentional decision. There were some other things that I thought were really curious. We recently dealt with, I got asked by a family member to help one of their friends. So I did a preview of, okay, I’m sure I’ll help you. I’ll direct you where you need to go as a financial planner. And he says, I have money with two other companies and I’m looking for a third. And I’m thinking to myself, huh, why does he want a third investment manager? And it really validated why, but Angie said people are looking for diversity of their advisors. The challenge is there’s been very little cohesion between those advisors.

So it’s not like I can call the other advisors and find out what they’re doing. They don’t wanna talk to me. I’m the enemy, right? Yeah, yeah. I’m the enemy of their AUM gathering. And at the same time, one advisor is typically left coordinating and there’s very little facility to do this. It’s one of the things you and I are trying to fix in the business. But I think it was interesting this talent gap comment that a lot of consumers are looking for different specialty talent. They need to just pull them together and create a dream team. How do they do this? Or they wanna work with a financial advisor who already has multiple skills on the bench.

Yeah, definitely. Hence the quarterback thing. Bring in the specialists for the life insurance, for the AUM, for the financial planning. And darn it all, they better all be talking to each other. Very true. So whether they do it themselves or they find a firm that’s already done it, it’s happening. I mean, that’s exactly what she’s saying. It is happening. What were takeaways for you? What do you really think was salient for everybody out there? Well, what we just talked about, definitely. I do think that that’s what’s happening more so. And people want specialists because they want specific answers to their specific problems. It’s that simple.

So that makes sense. I liked her price is a leading indicator comments. Mm-hmm. Listen to the market. It’s gonna tell you what it wants, what it likes, and what it doesn’t like. So if you can just get in by price and free and all that type of stuff, you’ll learn. So I like the comparison to the startup model quite a bit. And as I said before, if I were gonna jumpstart my RIA to the next level for my firm, I probably wouldn’t do it myself. I’d be involved in the conversations, but having advisors look at, all right, we’re gonna do this for free for the next year.

Or drop our prices by this for whatever, knowing that we’re gonna increase. Just a really interesting way to think about it. I just wish I had more time because if I did have more time, I would do it. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? And that’s why it’s so unappealing to establish advisors. They’re not trying to go crazy working all night long. They value their home time, their golf time. Oh, work-life balance is important. I guess you bring in more people, right? You bring in people to do it. Right, so I think price is a volume argument, right? You lower the price, you’re gonna just increase demand, right?

And so that means you gotta have the capacity to handle the demand, otherwise you’re not gonna even capture it. You’re gonna wind up being unprofitable. Our argument is that, well, you’ll just, if you do a good job, you’ll accumulate referrals. You’ll just get so much flow. You’re probably gonna have to grow and expand your team to handle it. So I think what’s really coming out of this is I’m hearing expand your team so that you have the specialty parties to handle it. That’s the first part. Invest in team. And if you’re really talking that you wanna grow, you wanna have a hockey stick, go compete on price or value, right?

Deliver value to the biggest population as possible and don’t limit yourself by thinking I can only work with physicians in my local region that are left-handed tennis players. Like I, there’s a couple of them out there maybe. So that’s what she’s saying. And I think that’s, it’s a really good recognition because I think most of us that I’ve gotten stuck on, I only want to niche at all costs and that’s the only way to move forward. And it isn’t. And it’s okay to do what she’s suggesting. The niche will reveal itself and then you can slow down at some point because you’re at the place you wanna be.

Maybe you only wanna be a single advisor shop. That’s cool. But if you’re looking to jumpstart that growth, you’re six, 12 months in and you’re just frustrated because your project 200’s gone and you’re tired of knocking on doors, maybe there’s a better way you can do this. Yeah. And I think it’s an interesting thing because what I didn’t understand the beginning of first hearing this is that price is a commentary on value. We always did financial planning as the loss leader to earn our credibility and our trust. We always did financial planning so that it was not a barrier to say you had to pay me $3,000 just for me to do the due diligence that I need to do anyway to give you suitable recommendations.

So I’m gonna do financial planning for free. We tried to do fee-based financial planning for many years. It really didn’t work well for us. And we still to this day at our firm, we do free financial planning if we decide that we wanna take you on. Of course, we used asset map to screen. So we know in the first 15 minutes whether this is gonna be profitable or whether this is just pro bono work, right? But sometimes we choose to do that because of the relationship or who had referred it because we wanna do that and we wanna serve. But most of the time we use still financial screening to figure out which team members we need to bring to the conversation.

Is this a deep analysis or is this triage? And I think that that’s an important aspect. I’m curious to kind of wrap this up. We had some very interesting guests the last couple of times. If you remember, Rich Campy said almost a contradictory thing here. He said, only spend time with ideal clients and get six favorable introductions per year. But what do you think about that? Well, if you are 10, 20 years in and you have that luxury and you only wanna grow strategically with a lot of AUM and very few clients, I think his model is brilliant. And we know for a fact it works.

It’s worked really well for a lot of high producing advisors. I think advisors six months in, even three years in, would struggle tremendously with that model. Not saying it couldn’t work, but I think it would be a much harder road early on to do that. It was essentially what he’s saying, or I’m saying it for him, is that we’re gonna eliminate 90% of the people you can work with right off the bat. Yep. And if I put my startup cap on for a second and you tell me I’m gonna eliminate 90% of the people you can sell to, I’m freaking out. Like, no, that’s not cool.

We’re gonna go sell to everybody to get revenue in the door, keep the lights on, keep buying my ramen noodles, and then eventually I can go do that. So that, yeah, I think Rich is brilliant and I think it works really, really well at a certain level. But to contrast that a little bit, what did Libby tell us? I think that was, so Rich was episode 36, I believe. Libby was 38. That’s right. Libby said, I don’t wanna say it was the opposite of this, but it was a compliment. She said, don’t ask for referrals because it’s creepy. Rather earn them through your intentional referral programs or how you deliver advice or guidance, whatever it is that you do.

And I think this is interesting because it addressed the, oh, I’m too scared to ask for referrals so I’m just not gonna ask and you don’t do anything. Her argument is find an alternative that still feels comfortable through programs, through innuendo, through connotating that you have referral programs. So you’re planting the seeds out there and of course it’s just all on delivery. What did you think about that in contrast to Rich? I really liked it. I think you could grow maybe a little bit faster as far as volume of clients versus Rich’s model. But I would say for Libby’s model, maybe probably not as established as an advisor that Rich is referring to.

You’ve made it past the first three to five years. You cut your teeth. You’ve got a little bit of recurring revenue. You’re okay. So now you wanna flip the model on referrals a little bit. So again, it can work really well. I like her inbound methodology and how they just made it a warm environment to be referable. So Adam, if I’m an advisor, I’ve listened to now these three different episodes. They contradict each other a little bit. And they don’t at the same time. If you think about it. For me, I think the number one takeaway is figure out where you are as an advisor with your practice.

And then latch onto one of these models that makes the most sense for where you are and where you want to go. Cause they all will work. That’s what’s cool. It just depends on who you are as an advisor where you wanna go. I totally agree. I mean, all three of these growth strategies from very respected successful people, very successful people. Very successful. And it’s interesting because Rich tends to work with the highest producers in the nation, right? The people who have achieved the pinnacle level of their profession that are hiring a coach at thousands of dollars a month, okay? They’re Jordans, okay? So they’re clearly gonna focus on, I’m only gonna spend my time with 10 clients.

That’s it, really. Not even 80-20. We’re talking 595 in terms of ratio where they’re spending their time. Libby is really focusing, I think in that, how do you transition from knowing that referrals is still gonna be your best customer, but not having to be awkward about it and not saying, hey, like what’s in it for me? And I think Angie’s argument is really actually, and I appreciate this, focusing on, again, the basics. Really growth models of a company, not just what we tend to talk about anecdotally in our business. Oh, you gotta get to referrals, you gotta niche, you gotta, right? You’re trying to get to this ascendancy of acting like the Rich Campi style advisor.

What got you here? Has been likely an absolute commitment to helping people, taking people on, and growing the customer base. And then you earn the luxury to do this intentionality of business design. And I think that so many advisors are getting a little bit, I don’t wanna say misled, but maybe miscued to say niche super early. I think you’re right there. Don’t do it too early. And struggle, right? Unless you already come from a professional. Let’s say you were an attorney or a CPA. You have credibility. Okay, you know, I remember when we started, people were like, why should I trust you? You’ve been in the business for two, three, four years.

Why am I gonna trust you with my life savings, right? You had to have a pretty good argument or a good salesperson. Deliver value for free. And ironically, just to close out, the moment which I mentioned a couple of episodes, that was the breakout moment for my career is when I offered a prospect, financial planning for free, because our other two advisors have never done any financial planning. They only did asset management. And I did that. And that’s what earned me the opportunity to do the business. That catapulted my entire business because I gave it for free. So we just don’t talk about price here.

Sometimes we can give value to people that other people would charge for. And they’ll be open to it. I’m happy to take something for free, right? Right, you just got a free scooter, right? You took it. Okay. I did, yeah. Right. They’ve listened to us dribble on long enough today, my friend. So let’s wrap this up. What should people do now? Well, certainly if you haven’t already, you gotta subscribe to the podcast or whatever subscription service you’re using. Remember to leave us a review. Reviews really matter as we’re learning in this podcast game. So if you have the opportunity to give us a five-star review, that’s awesome.

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Make it an awesome rest of your day, night, weekend, wherever the heck you are listening. And we’ll talk to you soon. Thanks, Derek. Thank you for listening to Rethink, the financial advisor podcast with Holt and Notman. Be sure to subscribe now and join the ongoing conversation. The information covered and posted represents the views and opinions of the guest and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of AssetMap or Connector. The content has been made available for informational and educational purposes only.