Financial Advisor Success

My guest today built his firm as a support platform for independent advisors. Jeff Concepcion is the founder and CEO of Stratos Wealth Partners, a corporate RIA and super OSJ under the LPL platform that oversees over $13 billion of assets under advisement across nearly 300 advisors in 100 different locations. In this episode, Jeff talks about the challenges he faced launching his firm, because whi...

Rachel Robasciotti is the founder of Robasciotti & Phillipson, an independent RIA that oversees $140 million of assets for more than 100 individual clients. With 15 years of experience in the industry, Rachel has not only built a successful firm, but also a unique proprietary investment process (dubbed RISE, for Return on Investment and Social Equity) that goes beyond doing socially responsible in...

Manisha Thakor is the founder of MoneyZen, a financial literacy and education platform focused on empowering women, and the VP of Financial Wellbeing at Brighton Jones, an independent RIA with $5 billion in assets under management. After following quite a unique path into the industry, Manisha built her own platform to share her message of financial literacy for women through speaking gigs and med...

My guest today keeps up our recent trend of speaking with advisors who serve a unique niche. The founder of Practical Financial Planning, Kenneth Robinson focuses his planning services specifically on Ohio public sector employees. A former public sector employee himself—before he transitioned into financial planning 20 years ago—Kenneth has managed to maximize the efficiency of his practice by dev...

Jared Reynolds is a partner at Wilkerson & Reynolds, an advisory firm that oversees nearly $160 million in assets under management. With a heavy focus on working with small business owners and their 401k plans, Jared has grown his business by serving a niche of bass fisherman, for whom he regularly organizes fishing and hunting trip expeditions as prospecting activities. In this episode, Jared sha...

Josh Patrick is the founder of Stage 2 Planning, an independent RIA with a niche focus on working with small business owners. Leveraging his own personal experience as a small business owner—before he transitioned into his second career as a financial planner—Josh has been able to create a deeply specialized advice process for his clients that commands retainer fees in excess of $50,000 per year....

My guest today is one of the pioneers of financial planning under the RIA model. Harold Evensky is the co-founder and chairman of Evensky & Katz / Foldes Financial, an independent RIA in South Florida that oversees nearly $1.5 billion in assets under management. With over thirty years of experience in the field, Harold literally wrote the book on taking a holistic, goals-based wealth management ap...

My guest today has crafted a niche of not just serving, but also trying to empower female clients. Hilary Hendershott is the founder of Hendershott Wealth Management, an independent RIA that oversees nearly $75 million of assets under management, as well as the creator of a coaching program for women trying to accumulate wealth and the host of a very successful podcast focused on helping women tak...

Dennis Moseley-Williams is the founder of DMW Strategic Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that works with financial advisors to help them design and deliver a great client experience. Not simply focused on how to improve client service, Dennis studied under Joseph Pine, co-author of the seminal book The Experience Economy , and is trained in applying the book's concepts specifically to the do...

My guest today has made it her mission to empower women to take control of their finances. Stacy Francis is the president and CEO of Francis Financial, an independent RIA with a unique niche focus on recent widows and women going through the divorce process. She is also the founder of Savvy Ladies, a nonprofit focused on improving the financial wellbeing of all women. In this episode, Stacy opens...

Andrea Schlapia is the founder of Ironstone, a practice management coaching and consulting firm for financial advisors who are struggling with the business execution challenges of transitioning from a practice to a business. Building upon her own experience as a financial advisor and a practice management consultant, Andrea has developed what she calls the "fundamental four" pillars of practice ma...

Today I'm joined by our first international guest, who gives us a look at not only what financial advisor businesses look like in other parts of the world, but also how all advisors should start looking at their value propositions. Jim Stackpool is the founder of Certainty Advice Group, a practice management consulting firm for financial advisors based in Australia. With a unique focus on how to p...

My guest today transitioned from working over 70 hours per week to refining his practice to the point that he's now only in the office for four months out of the year. Micah Shilanski is a partner with Shilanski & Associates, an independent RIA in Anchorage, Alaska that oversees nearly $130 million of assets under management for almost 160 client households. Focused on a niche of helping federal e...

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...