Dr. Wade Pfau, CFA, joined us on July 11th to share his Retirement Planning Best Practices and the science behind why they center around integrated solutions that include lifetime income guarantees. Feedback was extremely positive, with 100% of survey participants rating it Useful or Very Useful.
Crystal Thies, The LinkedIn Ninja, Business Consultant and Author, joined us on June 27th to share her six ingredients in the secret sauce for using LinkedIn to generate referrals. Feedback was extremely positive, with over 95% of survey participants rating it Useful or Very Useful.
CFA Charterholder Joe Maas, CFA, CFP®, CLU, ChFC, MSFS, CCIM, CVA, ABAR, CM&AA, joined us on June 14th to share how and why he’s adding annuities as an asset class in Smarter Investment Portfolios Include Annuities. Feedback was extremely positive, with 100% of survey participants rating it Useful or Very Useful. One attendee said, “this was really fantastic, thank you!”
Bob Veres, Business Leader and Author, joined us on May 16th to share a unique look at the Future for Wealth Management and his 10 Keys to the Profession’s Future. Feedback was extremely positive, with 100% of survey participants rating it Useful or Very Useful.
Stephanie Bogan, Executive Coach and Author, joined us on on April 19th to share her key RIA marketing insights in our Marketing Mindset webinar. She drilled deep into topics such as developing your brand promise and maximizing the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. The presentation promised to deliver actionable insights to maximize marketing ROI and it delivered, with over 90% of attendees rating it Useful to Very Useful.
There’s a change afoot in the way successful RIAs are finding new clients (see Bob Veres’ Your Next Wave of Clients).
There are 2 schools of thought on new sources: one group says more DIYers will begin to choose to use an advisor and the second group says clients will switch from other advisors (see Michael Kitces’ Death of Referrals). Your approach to each of these segments will be different.
Articulating and delivering on what makes you different and valuable to those prospective clients is a key first step. When over 80% of independent RIAs recently self-described themselves as holistic fiduciary planners, you know something has to change in the sea of sameness.
When you look at the money-in-motion from wire houses to independent RIAs over the next 5 years as independent RIAs increase their market share from 41% to 50% by 2020; selling your competitive value prop will become job #1.
You need to get on the new train along with the other successful advisors. Learn more about how to execute these changes on our next webinar with Stephanie Bogan. More on that later.
Seth Godin offers some key insights about how to accomplish these objectives.
As always, the early adopters will reap the benefits. This too applies to the birth of digital marketing for RIAs.
Bob Veres is one of our favorite thought leaders and he recently weighed in on the future of marketing for RIAs:
”This was before my time, but they tell me that cold calling was once a very effective marketing strategy — until, of course, it wasn’t. I remember when advisory firms routinely attracted dozens and sometimes hundreds of prospects to cheesy prepackaged seminars, until attendance gradually began to slip away.
Now I’m hearing that the most recent marketing innovation, client appreciation events where clients are invited to bring along their friends, is starting to lose its effectiveness, either because clients are no longer bringing their friends, or because their guests are too far outside the advisory firm’s target market.
Marketing trends come in and go out with the inevitability of sunrise and sunset. The question is: What’s next on the marketing horizon? How will advisory firms reach beyond referrals to attract the next wave of clients?”1
If you missed Part 1 of The Wealth Manager’s Perfect Storm of Risk, click here.
One of our biggest jobs as wealth managers is to protect our clients from unnecessary risk. The tools we use to diversify, allocate, rebalance and tax harvest have radically evolved in recent years.
In Part 1 of this blog series about risk, we talked about the “Perfect Storm” created by 3 intensifying risks that will impact your aging clientele’s retirement outcome:
This month the bull market marked its 8th anniversary. But as the Wall Street Journal reported March 8th, “Stocks Have Tripled Since Crisis, but Low Rates Are Still Squeezing Savers.”
Retirees have reacted to low interest rates by opting for higher-risk investment strategies, exposing themselves to volatility and sequence risk in an effort to make sure they don’t outlive their assets.
This week the Fed began to ratchet up rates. This might mark the end of the bull market in bonds. The Fed’s actions expose those retirees’ remaining fixed allocations to risks associated with rising rates.
Our March 15th Fireside Chat with Michael Kitces promised to deliver practice-shaping insights and calls to action on the post-DOL environment. It did not disappoint with over 90% of attendees rating it Useful to Very Useful.
In one of the most poignant moments, Michael noted that:
“If you look at the benchmarks, after stripping out markets and looking just at the growth of RIAs on a dollars-in, dollars-out basis; advisory businesses have had negative growth for the last 2 years.”
