Financial Advisor Success

Jon Guyton sits at an interesting intersection of the advisor world. The founder of Cornerstone Wealth Advisors—an independent RIA that oversees $240 million in AUM for mostly retiree clients—Jon runs an advisory business that implements the very retirement strategies he researched and published a number of important and influential articles about in the mid-2000s. In this episode, Jon shares his...

My guest today is Lisa Kirchenbauer, founder and president of Omega Wealth Management. Lisa's firm oversees more than $100 million of assets for nearly 100 affluent clients, with whom they've been able to form deep relationships by implementing George Kinder's EVOKE life planning process. And yet, even with the close relationships Lisa has with her clients, she has achieved what most advisors cons...

Roger Whitney is a partner with WWK Wealth Advisors, an independent RIA where he works with a personal client base of retirees with $75 million of assets under management. Perhaps even more impressively, he's been able to attract almost $50 million of those assets in just the past two years by launching a niche podcast on retirement. In this episode, Roger shares why and how he built his Retiremen...

My guest today works with financial advisors to teach them how to handle a tricky area for a lot of firms: working with widows. Kathleen Rehl is a speaker, trainer, and researcher specializing in the particular challenges of widowhood and how advisors can be more effective in dealing with these issues. Also the author of Moving Forward on Your Own: A Financial Guidebook for Widows , Kathleen spent...

Chip Munn is the co-founder and managing partner of Signature Wealth, a hybrid wealth management firm on the Raymond James platform that has quickly gone from $300 million to over $1 billion of assets in just the past few years. With a focus on buying books of business from retiring advisors and handing them off to younger advisors, the firm's tremendous growth comes not only from their unique acq...

My guest today is here to help with one of the most common challenges we face as advisors: getting clients to actually follow through and implement our financial advice. The founder of Sage Financial Solutions, an organization that provides Financial Fitness Coach (FFC) and Accredited Personal Financial Coach (APFC) training and certification programs, Saundra Davis teaches advisors skills and tec...

My guest today is here to talk about a kind of success that hasn't been covered much on the podcast: building a career within a larger firm instead of going independent. Kathleen Kenealy is the Managing Director and Senior Wealth Advisor for Boston Private Wealth—a private bank and trust company that oversees nearly $8 billion of assets under management—and while she manages more than $300 million...

There has been a lot of buzz over the past couple of years about the breakaway trend that has seen sizeable advisory firms moving away from wirehouses, and my guest today very recently went through that process himself. After spending the first decade of his career at Merrill Lynch, Michael Henley moved on to become co-founder and CEO of Brandywine Oak Private Wealth, an independent advisory firm...

My guest today comes from a different background than my usual guests, and she's here to answer the fundamental question of why clients sometimes don't take the advice we give them. Dr. Moira Somers is a clinical neuropsychologist who studies the complexities of how hard it is for people to change their behaviors, especially when it comes to money. Moira has applied her financial psychology expert...

Joe Duran is the founder and CEO of United Capital, a national independent RIA that oversees nearly $25 billion of assets under management and consistently ranks as one of the nation's fastest-growing wealth counseling firms. However, Joe doesn't view his firm as being in the wealth management business; he sees it as being in the financial life management—or FinLife—business, because, as he puts i...

As advisors, many of us have been taught that it's a bad idea to discuss religion or politics with clients, but my guest today disagrees with this conventional wisdom. In fact, he has found that focusing on religion has actually been good for business. Rob West is the president of Kingdom Advisors, a membership organization that supports financial advisors who want to serve Christians as their nic...

My guest today has not only gone against the conventional wisdom of never talking politics with clients, but he's based his entire business on that very subject. Zach Teutsch is the founder of Values Added Financial, an independent RIA that focuses on working with progressive Democrats. And while this undoubtedly drives some prospects away, it has also quickly accelerated the growth of his firm, w...

My guest today brings a very different perspective to the show, not just because of the clients she works with and how she runs her practice, but also because of her unusual path into the industry. After transitioning from working as a math teacher to offering financial coaching and counseling to doing financial planning work, Phuong Luong founded Just Wealth, a virtual, fee-only, hourly financial...

Stephanie Bogan is a successful practice management consultant who teaches advisors how to run an advisory business as a business. After building and selling her first consulting firm, Stephanie has gone on to found a new one called the Limitless Adviser Coaching Program, not because she needed to do so, but as a way to have a greater positive impact on the advisor community. In this episode, Step...

My guest today has seen what it's like to build an advisory business and what it's like to build a business for advisors. Previously a co-founder of IPS Advisor Pro—the first software for doing investment policy statements in a standardized way—Linda Lubitz Boone is now the founder of The Lubitz Financial Group, an independent RIA in that oversees nearly $250 million of AUM for 125 affluent client...

Today's guest has built a high-margin solo practice with quite an unusual structure. The founder of Bason Asset Management, James Osborne grew his advisory firm to over $225 million of AUM and nearly $400,000 of revenue by charging his clients a simple flat fee of $4,800—regardless of their assets. And he managed to do so by the age of thirty-five. In this episode, James shares why he decided not...

My guest today has one of the most fascinating practices and niches in the advisor space. Sunit Bhalla is the founder of Oak Tree Financial Planning, a solo advisory firm that oversees more than $40 million in assets under management in a hyper-targeted niche of engineers. A former engineer himself, Sunit has been able to build nearly $300,000 in revenue—with an 85% profit margin—by working with j...

Today's guest is an expert at operations and systems. Jennifer Goldman is the founder of an eponymous practice management consulting firm that works intimately with advisory firms on their operations, technology, workflows, and processes. After starting her career as a financial advisor and transitioning to operations leadership roles at two more advisory firms, Jennifer ultimately decided to go o...

My guest today trains and coaches financial advisors on how to ask the right questions in order to have better conversations with clients. Mitch Anthony is the co-founder of ROLAdvisor, a coaching community that helps practices transform into Life-Centered Planning firms. With his truly unique gift for finding the right words for effective client conversations, Mitch describes the value of financi...

My guest today has not only had a unique journey into the financial planning world, but she also brings a very different approach and perspective to the field. Julie Murphy is the founder and Chief Visionary Officer of JMC Wealth Management, a dual-registered advisory firm that serves more than 200 clients with $200 million of AUM—on top of generating nearly $300,000 a year in recurring planning f...

My guest today has built one of the largest successful advisory businesses in the country. Ric Edelman is the founder and executive chairman of Edelman Financial Services, a mega-independent RIA with more than $22 billion in AUM, with 165 advisors serving 36,000 clients across 43 office locations from coast to coast. After starting out like any other financial advisor—selling mutual funds in the 1...

Today we're going to talk about a topic that makes many financial advisors cringe: sales. But despite the negative reaction many people within the industry have to this topic, my guest today is here to explain why "sales" actually isn't a dirty word. Nancy Bleeke is the founder of Sales Pro Insider, a training platform for financial advisors that teaches how to better turn prospects into actual cl...

My guest today has had quite an unusual path through the industry. After building a successful practice at a wirehouse for the first 20 years of her career, René Nourse went independent so she could use the system she wanted to use to build with the type of clientele she wanted to serve. Now the founder of Urban Wealth Management—an independent RIA in the Los Angeles area that manages nearly $120...

Eric Roberge is the founder of Beyond Your Hammock, an independent RIA that specializes in financial planning services for high-income young professionals in their 30s and 40s. In just five years, Eric propelled his advisory firm from $0 to $300,000 of revenue with a unique marketing approach that's earned him a fair share of criticism along the way. In this episode, he shares how his unusual mark...

My guest today has been in the financial planning industry for 35 years, and has been incredibly active in the profession. In addition to serving as CEO of Yeske Buie, an independent RIA that manages nearly $750 million in AUM for 240 clients, Elissa Buie sits on the Cornerstone Advisory Board of the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, serves as a Dean for FPA's Residency Pr...