If you’re breaking away or forming your own RIA, you may feel alone with your marketing and growth efforts. Like most independent advisors, you’re eager to get your unique message out into the marketplace, but most of the time you’re at a disadvantage without the resources and support of a larger firm.
That’s why advisors who partner with FocusPoint for their back-office and technology needs also utilize our comprehensive Practice Development Program (we call it PDP).
A lot of firms may claim to help advisors with practice management or development, but what does that mean? We truly come alongside advisors, providing them with the support they need.
If you’re looking for a program that will have a TRUE IMPACT on your business, keep reading.
What sets our program apart from all the others?
REAL RESULTS, EXPERIENCE, AND HANDS-ON CONSULTING.
Once you choose to work with us, as part of our onboarding process, we recommend that you commit to spending one hour per week with our PDP team, working ON—not IN—your business. Advisors get to spend a weekly “hour of power” with our team of practice management consultants, focusing on their areas of greatest need. With a bit of dedication, teamwork, and collaboration, we’re able to cover a lot of ground each week.
While everyone is unique, our advisors find great value in our PDP team’s guidance in the following key areas:
★ Business and marketing planning
Our PDP team is laser-focused on helping independent advisors to not only establish, but reach, their goals. Once we’ve walked alongside you to form a solid and trusting relationship, we’re able to help you develop business and marketing plans with action items—specific to your unique strengths, audience, and budget. The type, cost, and frequency of the marketing methodologies that work for YOU won’t look just like anyone else’s—because no other advisor is just like you. While one advisor may like to blog, others may love to do podcasts, discuss investments, send a weekly newsletter, lead regular webinars, or host client appreciation events. All of this goes into your marketing plan, which doesn’t just sit there and collect dust…it’s revisited quarterly through our advisor scorecard process (see below). By the way, according to Schwab’s 2021 RIA Benchmarking Study, 53% of top-performing firms had a documented marketing plan.
★ Branding, messaging, and collateral
Most of our advisors have some of this already dialed in; however, the transition to their own RIA or new firm naturally breeds an opportunity to review (or create) updated branding, messaging, and collateral. This is not only the foundation for each advisors’ marketing efforts, it’s also critical to their overall contentment and productivity. If your message is strong, unique, and true for you (and let’s not leave out cohesive across the board), once it’s conveyed to an appropriate pool of prospects, it will very likely work hard for you…attracting the clients you’re meant to serve—and will enjoy growing with.
★ Client segmentation and service model
Speaking of serving clients, we often help advisors to segment their current client base based on criteria that’s uniquely important to them. Some advisors may segment solely by profitability of the client relationship, AUM, or investable assets; others may be more focused on their clients’ demographics, geography, future potential, or simply how much they enjoy working with them. No matter where advisors are on their growth journey, we’ve discovered that going though a guided exercise of client segmentation—as well as determining the appropriate service model and fee schedule for each client—is useful for almost everyone.
★ Technology suite best practices
Most advisors don’t have the interest, desire, nor knowledge base to research and pull together a complete suite of best-in-class, advisor-minded technology—including Orion and Salesforce. By partnering with FocusPoint, advisors leave the technology-related due diligence, updates, integration, and training to us. We’ve thoughtfully designed our non-proprietary technology suite to help advisors create a great client experience and focus on maintaining or growing their business. Our PDP team is continuously available to train and introduce best practices to advisors based on their individual needs and goals.
★ Referral strategy
Let’s not forget about referrals. While most advisors are used to relying heavily on referrals to create new clients, they typically don’t utilize a true process that results in a predictable referral stream. For this reason, we offer guided assistance to our advisors in developing a consistent, proactive referral strategy to help them grow their business and/or increase brand awareness.
★ Quarterly scorecard review
It’s your business. While we never dictate how they run their business, many of our advisors are happy to have our PDP team’s accountability support. In addition to the support we provide during our regularly scheduled calls, we can serve as an accountability partner to our advisors by creating a quarterly scorecard to help them keep track of their progress (based on the goals each has individually established for themselves). By reviewing the information available through this customized scorecard, we’re able to help you determine how well your marketing and business plan is going so far—what’s working and what isn’t? Then, we can help you to adjust accordingly.
Sound compelling? We’d love to hear from you.