The Elite Advisor Report Audio Podcast: Recent Episodes
CEG Worldwide
CEG Worldwide's audio podcast for top financial advisors hosted by the #1 coach in wealth management, John Bowen. We reveal RESEARCH-DRIVEN techniques for top financial advisors to implement right away.
At the end of the day, results are all that matter—for you, for your wealth management practice, for the financial advisors you serve and for the affluent clients they serve. In every episode John and CEG Worldwide Team offer effective and actionable research results and coaching programs to help today's high-functioning financial advisor build an amazing life of significance.
Let’s be honest: There probably are at least a few clients—maybe a lot—who simply aren’t right for you and your practice. Letting go of those clients can generate tremendous benefits—not just for your business, but for those clients who aren’t ideal for you. If you decide to transfer or sell clients to other advisors (either within your company or to an outside advisor), here are seven steps that will help you do so effectively.
I asked some of the top financial advisors in our elite, mastermind Roundtable Program to share their best ideas—the strategies that they have used to generate at least $150,000 in new revenues and that they believe other financial advisors could implement in their own practices to generate the same results.
There are seven steps to replicating ideal clients effectively. These steps will make the best use of your prospective client-seeking time, and will enable your favorite, most profitable clients to tell you how to work with other clients just like them.
The single best way to get more referrals from your satisfied clients is to stop asking them for those referrals. Instead of asking, offer those clients something of great value: a second-opinion service.
One of the most important business growth strategies you can implement as a financial advisor is to establish yourself as a top advisor among centers of influence—attorneys, accountants and other high-end professionals who work with the affluent clients you also want to serve.
Elite-level financial advisors are a diverse group. They serve a wide variety of clients and demographics. They organize their practices in numerous manners. And they define success in ways that can be unique and extremely personal to them. But they also share a lot of similarities—eight, in fact.
Being a thought leader is increasingly becoming a requirement for wealth managers who want to build very successful practices serving high-net-worth clients. A thought leader serves two powerful functions that will help you overcome the commoditization and competition challenges advisors face today. Maximizing current client relationships is one, and attracting affluent prospective clients the other. Result? To be positioned at the high end of the competence spectrum.
To garner affluent clients’ attention, bring them on board and successfully retain them over time, you need to know their hot-button issues—the key financial concerns that keep them up at night and the major financial challenges that could potentially derail their future.
Want to move upmarket and serve clients with more wealth than your existing client base? One of the most powerful steps you can take is to form strategic alliances with other professionals. Profitable strategic alliances are a hallmark of elite financial advisors earning at least $1 million a year.
With approximately 400,000 financial advisors practicing today, your major challenge is to stand out in a very crowded marketplace. The fact is, most clients can’t tell financial advisors apart anymore. The terms advisors call themselves have become largely meaningless, and most advisors’ “sales pitches” sound remarkably similar—and, frankly, pretty dull. The good news: There are two steps you can take that will clearly and definitively tell prospective clients and referral sources such as centers of influence how you are different from the pack and why they should work with you.
If you want more referrals from your clients, it’s time to stop asking them for names—and start offering a valuable service that can really help the people in their lives whom they care about most.
Discover how the second-opinion service can help you generate a steady stream of ideal prospective clients.
You might be able to get a lot of referrals from your existing clients—but you’ll almost certainly get higher-quality, more profitable referrals from attorneys, accountants and other centers of influence who regularly work with the affluent.
Check out how COIs can help you move upmarket and supercharge your growth.
When financial advisors and other business owners learn from each other in formal settings known as mastermind groups, great things can happen. That’s why so many elite financial advisors are part of these groups. Check out all the ways you can accelerate your success by joining a high-performance mastermind group of driven entrepreneurs like you.
Deliver an extraordinary experience to high-net-worth clients—time and time again. Build a great financial advisory business—and a great life!
If you want to work with the Super Rich—or even clients who aspire to become extraordinarily affluent—it’s a good idea to understand how this group thinks about building, enhancing and protecting wealth.
Did you know affluent investors have multiple personalities? Check out the nine HNW personality types that every financial advisor needs to understand to serve the wealthy and score big. Build a great business—and a great life!
The next time you sit at your desk, pull up your client list. Give it a good look and ask yourself: “Should I really be working with everyone on this list?”
If you’re being honest with yourself, you will have to admit that there probably are at least a few clients—and maybe a lot—who simply aren’t right for you and your practice.
Every financial advisor wants highly loyal clients. It means you don’t have to hunt as much for new assets, and it helps ensure a steady revenue stream over time.
But unless you possess six key traits that foster rock-solid client loyalty—and demonstrate to your clients that you actually possess those traits—you risk stalling out instead of accelerating your success.
Don’t let that happen! Check out my latest episode of The Elite Advisor Report to discover the six Cs of client loyalty—what they look like, how to implement them in your business, and how to make sure you communicate them to your clients.
To attract the affluent—and you should—position yourself a standout thought leader among the specific types of high-net-worth clients you most want to serve and can serve extremely well (and profitably). How important is thought leadership? I can tell you that it’s helped my various businesses over the years raise tens of billions of dollars in assets. I can also tell you that the advisors in our mastermind programs report that being positioned as thought leaders has been a game changer for their businesses.
But don’t simply take my word for it. We've surveyed 488 wealth managers about thought leadership and share the results in this podcast.
As financial advisors look to move up the hierarchy of —in many cases aiming for the elite level characterized by advisors earning incomes of $1 million or more—one fact becomes crystal clear:
You’ve got to stop being reactive in your business—responding to whatever appears before you and saying yes to any prospective clients who cross your path. Instead, you need to become highly proactive and deliberate about your choices.
If you’re not focused on delivering a world-class client experience, you’re going to find it extraordinarily hard to move upmarket, serve wealthier clients and build a business that supports the quality of life you want for yourself.
These days, you can be the most technically skilled financial advisor on the planet—but unless you’re actively working to make your clients feel like everything you do is all about them, it won’t matter.
Let’s face facts: Financial advisors live in a world of commoditized investments and fees that are constantly getting more compressed. These days, if you’re focused only on helping your clients manage their investments—or even if that’s most of your value offer—you’re going to struggle to stay profitable. That’s why you’ve got to be on the lookout for opportunities to help your clients address their needs beyond investments.
Do you know your top clients well—really, really well?
Are you sure?
Chances are, there are gaps in your knowledge of your existing clients—and those gaps between what you think your clients care about and what is actually on their minds could be costing you plenty in lost opportunities to retain key clients and tap additional sources of revenue.
As a financial advisor, you are an entrepreneur. That’s true regardless of whether you own your own firm or are affiliated with a larger company. In all cases, financial advisors are working to build strong practices. --- But here’s a question: Are you a driven entrepreneur?
Do you want to have a sustainable competitive advantage over all the other financial advisors who serve clients who are ideal for your financial advisory business? ----- I thought so. (You probably wouldn’t be here if you didn’t!)
You might be surprised to learn that you possess one of the most powerful tools for making new connections and attracting affluent prospective clients to your financial advisory business—and chances are, you’ve never used it or even noticed it. That tool is your personal story—a key part of your overall value promise to affluent clients and prospective clients who want help making smart decisions about their wealth.
Top financial advisors generate huge success when they do one thing above all else: act as consultants to their clients and work in real partnership with them over time.
That consultative, partnership-based approach is driven by a systematic process to deliver comprehensive wealth management solutions to your clients—solutions that go beyond investments to also address the affluent’s five biggest concerns and they are as follows...
To attract, serve and retain demanding affluent clients today, you have to offer them expertise and solutions in areas ranging from estate planning and asset protection to charitable giving and perhaps even concierge medicine.
The problem: If you’re like most financial advisors, you’re really great at investment management—but you may not possess the requisite expertise in these and similar areas to deliver a really world-class service experience.
You could go back to graduate school and spend years becoming exceptional in these subjects. But I don’t recommend it!
In my 30+ years working with financial advisors and financial institutions, I have yet to meet a financial advisor who doesn’t want to be successful.
But success means different things to different advisors.
That means it’s very important for each of you to be crystal clear on where you are today, where you want to be in the future and how you intend to get there.
If you really want to achieve success as you define it, you have to act to be successful on purpose. That means being deliberate—not stumbling around in the dark hoping you will bump into success. Advisors who hope they will find the keys to success almost always find that they’ve wasted a lot of time, energy and money.
The explosion in wealth in recent years means you have an unprecedented opportunity to accelerate your success, generate a much higher income and live a great life that’s supported by your business.
To capture that opportunity, you have to know where you are today and where you want to go—oh, and what it takes to close that gap. Specifically, it’s very useful to understand what top advisors do differently or better than their less successful peers.