Hey everyone, I'm Aisha Bayless and I'm on the NAPFA Genesis Committee as the webinar coordinator. Welcome to this NAPFA Genesis webinar sponsored by LLIS in Tampa, Florida. LLIS is the exclusive sponsor of NAPFA Genesis, bringing you these webinars, national conference and symposium scholarships, social events at NAPFA national conferences, plus two Genesis webinars per year on the latest in insurance and risk management. I'd like to welcome our presenter today, Brooklyn Brock. Brooklyn is a third generation financial advisor and founder of Elevate Advisors LLC, specializing in financial planning and exit coaching for advisors themselves. Throughout her career, Brooklyn has found advisors rarely do financial planning or retirement planning for themselves like they do for their clients, which drove her to launch her own firm to serve advisors exclusively. Elevate Advisors was named best exit coaching firm for advisors in the USA in the 2022 Investment News Retirement Awards. And Brooklyn was the 2021 NextGen Oklahoma Award winner in finance. Brooklyn, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Aisha. Oh, since I sent you that bio, we've taken out those awards because it makes me sound so like, I don't know, prestigious or stuck up or something. It's good. You should celebrate that. Well, thank you. It's nice to be here. Like Aisha said, we will take comments throughout the session. I will tackle those as we go. So if I see a question pop up, I'll pause and address it. And if I missed a question, Aisha will call it out to me. So feel free to interact as we go. And hopefully we'll have time for questions at the end as well. So today our session is going to be two parts. The first part is on niching. The second part is on how to start the succession planning conversation for younger advisors who have the opportunity someday to buy into ownership and not sure how to approach that topic. So I will try to do 50-50. So halfway to the top of the hour, I'll kind of switch gears is the plan, at least. So I think part of the reason I was asked to talk about niching is because of my niche. It's pretty different doing financial planning for advisors. And when I say that, people always interpret it a little bit differently. Each person hears me say something different, even though it's the same words. Some people think that it's para-planning, like doing financial planning for the clients of advisors, but it is actually the financial planning for the advisor themselves. So I work with some advisors getting close to retirement, and they're wanting to sell their business, or younger advisors who have gotten an equity offer. And they're like, how do I analyze this and pay for this and still achieve my financial goals and provide for my family? So it's fun. It's complex. I love it. And how did I get here is the question. I'm the only firm that does this, to my knowledge. So my advice would be welcome, if someone else wanted to join the niche, because there are 400,000 advisors or more in the US, and I'm the only one doing this. And I'm happy to share my journey and how I identified my niche, because some of those steps in my journey may be something that help you identify your niche and get excited about that. And hopefully, you end up loving your work or someday even launching an RAA that specializes in doing something that you love just as much as I love what I do. So I have split the niching topic, if you will, into three parts. We're going to start with what is a niche, high level? And then do I need a niche? And third, how do I niche? And I will just say pronunciation wise, I don't know if it's niche or niche. I'm going to say niche, but I don't know that anyone's really a stickler about that. Okay, what is a niche? So in preparing for this session, I looked up some Michael Kitsis articles. He's done so much research on the value of niching and how to niche and all of this stuff. I can share my journey, but I also wanted to kind of start with some high level definitions. So the three core elements of a niche, according to his definitions, are that it has a target clientele. And I love the way that he summarized this by saying that your target market is like a group of real people. So like mine would be advisors. But a niche is something that you make up. So in identifying my niche within my target market of advisors, I did that. At least I think I'm doing that. You always refine it as you go, you'll find the journey is about refining. But right now our three core values are vulnerability. So the advisors have to be willing to get vulnerable, to be the kind of person who is willing to ask for help. And then second being having a growth mindset. So they have to not only be able to ask for help, but also to implement the changes that we talk about. They have to be open minded, open to change, and almost like looking for a change. I don't know that that's specific to advisors. Typically any client who's reaching out is at some kind of a pivotal moment of change in their life. So I think that's kind of across the board. But some advisors I found may be, I don't know, set in their ways, if we can say that. They've been doing what they do for so long that they don't want to change. They don't want to ask for help. So it takes a certain kind of advisor within the target market to say, yeah, that's me. I want help. I want to change. And then the third core value being stewardship. I have found as I've launched my firm, that it's all about me. It's the Brooklyn show half the time. It's even me presenting today. It puts me in the spotlight a lot. So I wanted to make it one of our core values that I don't do what I do to get rich. It's more about being a steward of the assets that I have, of my income, of my net worth, and recognizing how that benefits the other people in my life. So those are some of the ways that I identify my niche of the clients who actually hire me within the total target market of advisors. So that's the first core element of a niche is the target clientele. Who do you serve and what are their needs? And target markets versus niching is part of that kind of exploring your niche. But then the second core value of a niche is unique expertise. So to kind of figure this out for yourself, you could ask the question, what unique knowledge or skills do I bring to the table to serve my target clientele or my niche that they will not or cannot get anywhere else? So for my example, with my firm, there are no other firms who do what I do. So that's easy to check that box. But even further, we offer exit planning. So we are an REA, we do financial planning for advisors. We don't offer investment management, actually, it's just the financial planning right now. But we offer, instead of investment management, we offer exit planning. So talking about succession planning, continuity planning, what happens if the advisor were hit by the proverbial bus? So that kind of expertise comes into play with the financial planning. And I think that that goes towards the unique expertise as being the second core element of the niche. So the third core element is service or business model. So what actual services will you provide to deliver your unique expertise and how you get paid to serve the target clientele? For Elevate, we do this in financial planning by starting with an initial financial plan, and then transitioning to quarterly relationship meetings, is what we call them. I did that because I identified in my niche, not even in the target market, but in the niche specifically, that the advisors who, or the clients who come to me to hire me, I'm trying to like not make this sound like a sales pitch, because it's not, I'm trying to like, work through like, how do I describe my niche to you? So I found that my clients typically value the relationships in their life. Everyone who meets our three core values is going to be focused on the people in their life and doing the right thing by those people. So we call our ongoing service relationship meetings. So we meet quarterly, Q1 is focused on you and your money. So that's like, who are you? Maybe we're doing a strengths finder, maybe we're doing your personal core values. It's something about like who you are as a person, because you have to know that to be able to set financial goals for your financial plan. Q2 is about you and your family and your money. So that might be college planning, estate planning, something of that nature with your family involved. Q3 is you and your business. So my niche is typically business owners, or they soon will be at least partial business owners. So we need to spend at least a portion of the year talking about all of the complexity involved with the business. If you have business owner clients, or you choose to niche with clients who are business owners, you may find that it's hard to separate how much time you spend working on the business from the time that you spend on the financial plan, because it's really easy to spend a ton of time and you have to know where to draw the line in the sand to say, well, that's like business consulting, I need to charge separately or extra for that, otherwise it's not a viable business model. And then Q4 for us is you and taxes, you and the IRS. We do year-end tax planning, gifting strategies, that kind of thing. So that's how my service model or my business model kind of rounds out my niche. So again, the three core elements of a niche, target clientele versus niche, unique expertise and service or business model. And I'm checking, I don't see any questions, anyone has questions, throw them at me. So I'll move on to the six types of a niche. And I will just say there's a caveat I feel in that there's not like a niche is one of these six types, a niche can be several of these types. And I almost identify with like my business meets a certain part of each of the types. So this isn't as clear cut as it sounds, but it can be helpful to kind of parse out your thoughts and figure out which of these types of niches may be more of a draw to you. So the first one is affinity, which is essentially a common social circle that you may have. So the horrible example would be like my brother was in college and he interviewed for Northwestern Mutual and they were like, what we do with Northwestern Mutual is we help you identify your 100 or 200 closest contacts and you call all of them and sell them insurance. So we don't do that, but there is some kind of a benefit to saying, okay, my friends and family, what do we have in common? Because I'm going to be able to understand them better if I'm in a similar stage or age of life. So I think there is something to be said for that. I wouldn't ever run my business the way that Northwestern Mutual would, I'd tell my brother too, but I think there is something to be said for that. And that is one of the reasons that made me even think of this niche idea as an option. Like it was mentioned in my bio, I'm a third generation advisor. So as I was thinking of launching my firm and what would I niche in, I was like, well, who are my friends and family? Oh, they're all advisors. That tells me something. You could get from that, maybe it's another niche could have been business owners. I didn't go in that direction, but you kind of look at your friends and family. And I have other advisor friends who focus on college planning because they're a newly married couple, have a few young kids at home and that's just where they are in life. So that's where they're naturally going to be meeting people. And you may find that if you're going through it, you enjoy helping other people navigate it as well. That's the affinity type of niche. The second is values. So based on a shared philosophy or values, so this could be something like religion or politics. People often ask me about the CKA designation. That's one of the designations that I have. And it's about, well, it stands for Certified Kingdom Advisor. So I'm in Oklahoma, which is like the Bible Belt. Lots of Christians, but it even is a connection point for people from any religious background to say or to communicate to them that I approach financial planning with a values based mindset. So I'm going to be help you become aware of your values and how to integrate that into your plan, to drive your plan and make your money serve you ultimately. So it's not so much a detractor as it is something that I share with people from any religious background. So that's an example. I didn't choose to go with that niche, but it really depends on what you care about and what you see other people doing and what gets you excited. So let's see, the third one is educational. So this type of niche serves clients who need to be educated on a particular subject. So I like to think of this one as the college planning I mentioned earlier, very complex or it can be. So there's a lot more to navigate. I guess another would be like clients who have stock options or grants, that kind of thing can also be complicated. But I don't find myself struggling with that as much in my niche. Advisors are already pretty knowledgeable, but it really comes out in educating the non-advisor spouse in a way that isn't talking down to them, more bringing them into the conversation. So that is something that we've become more aware of and how we how we work with our clients. And the fourth is experiential. So based on creating a different sort of client experience, and I like to give an example here of one of my friends, Cody Garrett, he owns the firm Measure Twice. I think it's Measure Twice Financial, and he does financial planning work with DIY investors. So he'll do a one time plan and send them out the door to implement the plan on their own. That's totally different business model than what I do. So the experience for the clients on the other side is very different. And you can make an entire niche just out of that, how you do things differently than other planners. The fifth one is psychosocial. So serving clients with common psychosocial profiles or needs. So this might be someone who's gone through a divorce. With my clients, it's probably going to be advisors looking to retire, have a huge life transition. I mean, anyone looking to retire, but especially business owners, kind of creating your identity outside of work can be a really difficult transition. So helping people through that transition can be something that you make a niche out of. And that's just one example. Divorce is another. I've known advisors who help clients move overseas to different countries, and that's a whole next level of complexity and life transition that she's made a really successful niche out of that. So the sixth is technical, so advisors who have a deep experience in a specialized area. And I shared earlier how we do exit planning as our kind of deep dive area. And I will just throw, I think, yeah, I can do this. I'd like to share a link to some of these articles for anyone who's interested in diving into this further. Is that OK if I do that, Aisha? OK, so I will. Oh, it just pasted the text, not the link. It turns into a link when you hit enter. Oh, OK. Let me do this then. There's the first one, and that's on the six types of financial advisor niches that I just covered. And then let me do this next one, because that'll take us into our next section. And will those get picked up in the recording out of curiosity? I can post them in the in the course afterward. OK, that would be great. So the next section, just to summarize and transition better, we just covered what is a niche. Next, we're going to cover, do I need to niche? I do not have a whole bunch of research studies to present to you today. Those have been done. Those are out there. Michael Kitsis and XYPN have done a lot of research on this year over year, measuring the growth of their member firms who have niched in the first few years as opposed to the later years. Compared to firms who did not niche, what does the growth look like? And typically for firms who niche, it's slower in the beginning and then it jumps up really high, really fast. So there's a lot of research out there about that. I wanted to focus on some of like the emotional turmoil going on behind the scenes to kind of help you make the decision if niching is right for you. So the first thing that I hear advisors say is that it can be really scary when it feels like you're saying no to prospective clients because you want your firm to be successful. Why would you tell anyone no? And I think that's what my dad and granddad told me when I told them what I wanted to do with my niche. They were like, why would you ever turn a client away? And these are some of the things that I've read in Michael Kitsos articles, but also kind of experienced from doing this with my own firm. So I've kind of lived it and I have this like gut feeling of like, this is right from my own experience. So I've learned that niching will definitely still bring clients outside of your niche. So even if you throw out there, you only work with doctors, you will get veterinarians who call you and they're like, well, would you make an exception for me? I'm just a different kind of doctor. So that's kind of up to you if you wanna make it an exclusive niche. I did, it definitely slowed down my growth in the beginning and I've gotten five clients in the last three months. So I'm in my third year, second or third year, we'll turn three in February. So this is like the second full year, I think. So I can tell you, I got like one one-time client, one-time planning client the first year. It was miserable. I was like, I have made a fatal mistake, but I stuck with it and I am exclusive. So I don't take on any other clients except those within my niche. And now I got five. So it's like, okay, I think it does work. I mean, I've seen it work. It is about kind of the waiting game. So with that approach in mind, I was expecting it to be slow. So when I launched my REA, I knew that I would have to have some kind of income to cover the expenses of my business while I was waiting for the niche to work. But also I had to contribute to my family's fossil income. My husband has a fantastic job, but it doesn't quite cover everything. So I had to contribute from day one of launching my REA. So I do some pair of planning on the side, even now, it gets to be a smaller percentage of our revenue every year, but that's what I chose to do so that I could fully commit to my niche. That's not like it's the right way that everyone else has to do it that way. That's just what I chose to do. It's all part of the planning process and finding out the way that you wanna run your firm and what makes you happy. So I have, I will say, I took on an exit planning client who was not an advisor. They were a tax preparer. And I was like, that's close enough. It was like early days of my business and they were project-based clients. So now they've moved on and it opens up room for other advisor clients. So you can choose how exclusive you wanna be. And we are exclusive now. So it just depends on what you want. At the end of the day, I'd say it's more about saying yes to the right clients. So if you get more calls with the right kind of clients, your close rate will be higher. So let's say you get a hundred calls with a hundred different kinds of clients. They may not be compelled to say yes to you, as it doesn't click right away. It's not an obvious fit. If you have 25 calls with the clients who are an exact fit, your close rate may be like 50, 75%. And I think that is a better use of my time. I don't like spending time on the phone with clients and trying to like sell them on my services or on me as their advisor when it's not the right fit. It's easier for me to say, you know what? You're not a fit because you're not an advisor and this is what I do. So it kind of gives me an out. I don't get pressured into taking clients that I don't really wanna work with. So it just makes it clearer for me. But that's a personal preference. And if you choose to have a different approach to your business with not having income, you may feel like you need to say yes to more clients in the beginning. That's not bad. It's just important to clearly outline how you want to start and grow your firm. So that's just thinking from my perspective. Let's see. It also makes it easier for the right clients to find you. So I'm thinking of like our age of the internet and how you can really leverage the SEO. I mean, it feels cliche to say that, but it does make a difference. If you're like one of the hundreds of thousands of advisors who do retirement planning, how are people gonna find you? You're gonna have to niche in some other way, whether it's geographic areas and getting involved in your community. There is something that you're gonna have to do to find clients. And it's so much easier if you kind of stake your flag in the ground and say, this is what I do and kind of like shout it to the rooftops. Eventually the people who are looking for that will find you and it will work from a marketing perspective. Oh, I see a question. Do you use a specific company to connect you with companies looking for a part-time paraplanner? Ah, so at first I did paraplanning for a number of advisors and I found that they wanted me to move into more of a lead advisor, client-facing role. And I was like, no, no, like I have my firm, I'm gonna be client-facing with my clients, but not with yours. So I connected with Sue Chesney at Delegated Planning and she has some requirements about, I think you have to have your CFP and maybe a few other things. But if you pass the requirements, you can do paraplanning for her. And she charges $160 an hour to the advisor and she pays out $100 an hour once you've completed your training and onboarding with her to you as the paraplanner, which I found to be pretty good dollars per hour compared to other paraplanning jobs that are posted. But I'd also check out Simply Paraplanner or even throwing out a comment in the NAPFA Facebook group or something. You could find advisors who are looking for a number of things. So yeah, can I mark answer live on this, Aisha? I'm gonna, yeah, I'll do that. Okay, so let's see. Do I need to niche? What are the other talking points here? Yeah, so I think the last thing is that I really love what I do. And I didn't find that with a lot of the clients that I worked with before. So I knew that I was looking for something different and I felt like this would be that for me, that working with advisors would be the thing that I love to do for the rest of my life, but it would never feel like I work another day in my life. Well, I can tell you it's definitely still work. But I get a lot more satisfaction and fulfillment in what I do because I know that it aligns with who I am and what's important to me. I didn't share my story at the beginning, but I did work with my family's advisory firm for a time and my granddad could not transition to retirement successfully. He would boomerang back into the business because he didn't have an identity outside of work or really a life or anything to do. So they eventually changed the locks on the doors one day and that was a little bit traumatic. I mean, it became to the point where it was threatening to clients because he couldn't keep up with the products and the details and might have sold clients a life insurance policy they didn't need or something to that effect. So they had to do something. I wasn't there when they did that, thank goodness. I left like a year before, but that is a huge reason why I do what I do because I know a lot of other advisors may plan to never retire. And that's kind of like a segue into our succession planning conversation in a minute. But why would we not get the chance to retire? Like we help other people retire all day long, but I don't get to enjoy it. Like that doesn't seem fair. And I think for my granddad, he never kind of turned the lens back on himself and like took care of himself first. It was always putting the clients first. So that's why I do what I do. And it makes me really happy. It aligns with my values and what I experienced in my family. And I think these are all like the way that I phrased this conversation is all incentivizing. Like you can use the SEO to grow your business and you'll be happier with your life than work. But you could also turn that around from the other angle and say someone without a niche might have a lower close ratio with prospective clients, which means lower business growth over time compared to niching. You could also say they won't stand out from the crowd of other advisors and they ultimately won't be doing work that they love, the lower satisfaction. And that doesn't sound fun either. So it's like the carrot or the stick. Either way, niching makes a lot of sense to me. It may not be right for everyone, but if it's interesting to you, that's some of the rationale behind it to kind of back up some of those gut feelings that may drive people to niche with like, yeah, this actually works and here's why. Okay, questions coming in. How do I get over the fear of pursuing a niche without knowing enough subject matter expertise? Cross-border planning is a tough one. When I was looking at starting my RIA, that is the only other niche that I considered because I speak French and one of our goals in our financial plan is to buy a place in France. And I ultimately decided not to do that because I did this really difficult exercise, not to scare you from this or anything, but for myself, I did an exercise where I said, okay, I can charge within this range for financial planning. To charge much more than that, it's kind of like pricing out the families that really need the help. Because there are a lot of families that have cross-border planning needs. And if I price them out, then like, I'm not really happy. I'm not doing the kind of work with the people who really need it. It would only be the really rich families that I would be able to service. So I'd like to price this. And with how much work it would take to do those financial plans, like 20, 30, 40 hours per plan, like the complexity goes up quite a bit. And with cross-border planning, it goes up if you're working with people from any country. I was looking to just specialize with clients who speak French. And even that, it's like, there are people who speak French in Vietnam, in Switzerland, in France. They're everywhere. And they may be coming from those countries to the US or in the US going to those countries. And either way, they're not gonna stay in French-speaking countries. They're gonna go anywhere. Like it could be a military family that gets relocated. Like you don't really have control. And so with the number of countries that I would have to be an expert in, the complexity goes way up. And I just decided I couldn't make a viable business model out of doing cross-border planning for the kind of financial return that I needed to get to support my family. But there are other firms that do this and do it successfully, and they're known for it. So to explore that, I had talked to the firm called the White Lighthouse. So you might call them and see if you could talk to one of their advisors to kind of get their experience and what's there like worth it. And how did they structure their service models? And I know there are more firms out there like that. For me, it wasn't the right fit. There's definitely a way to do it. So I think the subject matter expertise comes with time. All of the reasons that I said make cross-border planning complex means that even the advisors who do this as a niche are not subject matter experts in everything. And that's what makes it time-consuming is that you're never gonna be an expert in anything in every country, especially because the laws change all the time and the tax laws and everything. So you just kind of get in there and you have to spend a lot of time answering the questions. And if that's something that's interesting to you, then it may be worth it. That I think was the reason I ultimately decided not to do it was that I knew we weren't moving to France or buying property over there, nor have I ever moved overseas. So I have not personally experienced any of those things. And I didn't have that connection with that target market like I do with advisors. Like that's my family, right? So I think there are a few different things here. You don't have to be a subject matter expert for that niche specifically. You just have to be willing to jump in and do the work and to love helping those people and to have a heart for it. So I will mark that one as answered live. Unless if I did not fully answer your question, I'd come back and rephrase it or ask a follow-up question for sure. What specifically about working with advisors is most fulfilling? I feel like I've covered that in answering a few of the other questions, but I will just summarize it by saying that, like I said, I speak French. And there's something that you share with someone else who speaks French, specifically like a person from France, where it's like in learning the language, I have to learn a certain amount about the culture. And so I see you. I know where you're coming from. I know your background. I have tried to learn your language. I'm not gonna get it right, but that's something that we share. It's like, I don't know, in America at least, it feels like a secret language because no one else speaks French. So like we share this like really cool secret thing in common. That's probably my favorite thing in working with advisors that makes me feel the same way. Of like, we share something really unique that we chose to go into this business and to help people. And we see the world differently, especially if they also share our core values. So I think that's, it's just, it's really cool. It's hard to put into words. It's more about like the emotions that I get when I'm doing the work. Okay, another question. How do you handle a client passing away with an age? For example, if you only work with business owners and that business owner dies, do you continue working with the spouse or kids even though they're not in the niche? That's not one I've had to tackle yet. I did ask myself that question when I was niching. And ultimately I decided that I would still work with those clients. I think I made that decision because I feel like it's the right thing to do, especially because I don't wanna fire someone when they've just lost an important person in their life. But I could theoretically create a path to say, hey, I'll help you through the transition and then I'll help you find the better advisor to serve you. And depending on who it is, I could still do that. Like I could see if one of my advisor clients got divorced and the spouse didn't wanna work with me, like there are all kinds of things that come up in a divorce. I would be fine referring them to another advisor. And sometimes that could even be the better decision for them. So I think it's probably on a case-by-case basis, but I wouldn't turn away someone who's outside of my niche because of a death situation. That's my approach to it, but that doesn't make it the right way. It's really up to you. So that's my feedback. Okay, so I'm going to post this last link here because I'm not gonna have as much time to cover it. So how to niche. I told you about my two niches and I basically am an Enneagram four, which means I'm very self-aware and I'm always on the hunt for like, who am I? Who's my authentic self? So I started by looking at myself. Who am I? What do I love? How does that come into my career? And that really guided my decisions on putting the initial list together, even though my list was only two. I would still say to start there, I did the section of researching, shadowing people. I talked to the White Lighthouse group to make the decision that that was not the right niche for me. But I would ultimately say, don't let like the pressure to niche keep you from launching because I've worked with advisors who niche over the years that we've been working together. Like it may not be clear at first, but those things may come out to you the more that you work with clients and get experience and find out what you love or maybe you go through a life experience. Like I had an advisor friend whose husband was diagnosed with a chronic illness from which he ultimately passed away. And now she works with widows and people with family members who have special needs just because that's what life brought her. And so she has this expertise and a way to kind of give back and share this with other people and take off the burden. But she didn't know that when she was getting into the business. So things will happen that point out different niches. Hopefully it's not something like that for you. Hopefully it's something more positive, but yeah, you don't have to niche from the get-go like I did. That's just one way of doing it. That link to the last article I shared has Michael Kitsa's steps to how to find your niche. If you've launched and you're looking for your niche, I would say go through those steps. He's outlines this method of like interviewing people who you have close relationships with to kind of get their recommendations on what a natural niche would be for you. And I didn't end up doing it that way, but if you're struggling to figure out your niche, that's definitely something you could try. Okay, 10 minutes over, but we're gonna transition to the second half of our presentation, Succession Planning Conversation Starters. So I wrote an article that was published in the FPA Next Generation Journal, I think is what that's called, in April. So I listed out a number of talking points for those people who are part of G2, right? That's kind of what they call us. The next generation, typically we're younger than the people who are selling, so I say younger advisors, but that doesn't mean you have to be young to be someone's succession plan. Those are the talking points that I'd like to go over, but one of the takeaways from our presentation, it's not really a handout, it's not really slides, it's the Hit by the Bus workflow. I presented that at the NAPFA Spring Conference in Atlanta, so there should be a recorded session of that. If you attended the conference, you should be able to access that. I went through the Hit by the Bus workflow step-by-step and outlined it quite a bit further, and I lead a NAPFA group on this topic, helping advisors find a continuity partner, because that's ultimately what the Hit by the Bus workflow is. You identify a continuity partner, and if something ever happens to you, like you're incapacitated, like you go into a coma for an unknown period of time, or you die, then this Hit by the Bus workflow would be the list of things that need to happen. If you don't have a continuity partner, it would probably be like your spouse, or an advisor friend from your study group, who would be picking up the pieces, and this is supposed to be a guide for them. The Hit by the Bus workflow is like the list of steps they would need to follow. It kind of highlights some of the things that you want to have in place before, like finding your continuity partner. The reason we included that as a deliverable from this session is that continuity planning is often one of the most safe ways to bring up succession planning with someone that you're working for. The whole topic around succession, and selling, and retiring to an older advisor, like you say those words, but they hear the word death, and insignificance, and you don't matter anymore. So I would be careful in using those terms cavalierly. Continuity planning is like a practice run. Every advisor, even if you don't own a business, needs to have a continuity plan, or at least some understanding of like, hey, if something happened to me, who would take care of these people? That's part of what it means to be a fiduciary, to have your CFP. If you own a firm, you have to do that as part of your registration. They don't require a separate legal document, but it can be part of your operating agreement, for example, where you list the name of that person who would step in and help service the clients. So in the NAPFA group on this topic that I lead, we dive a little bit deeper into finding the continuity partner. What do you need to know before hiring an attorney to do the legal document? We go through the hit by the bus workflow. So if you own a firm, or if you ever end up owning a firm in part or in whole, that may be something that you would be interested in joining. Heidi just threw something in the chat. Yeah, that looks interesting. Okay, so other than continuity planning as being like a safe place to ask an advisor, like, hey, if something unexpected were to happen to you, what would you want to happen to your business? Who would service your clients? Because that matters to all advisors. So that can be a safe place to start, but there are lots of other ways to bring the conversation up. So this is where I'm going to transition to go over the talking points from the article that I published in the FPA Next Generation Journal. There are nine, that's a lot, but I grouped them into three categories. So three talking points in each of the three categories, the first one being open communication. So this is one of the things that I like to emphasize as like if you don't have open communication with whoever you're working for, could be a red flag. So there are three questions that you can ask yourself to kind of dive deeper to see if you have open communication or if that could be a problem with a potential succession plan. So the first question is, is the advisor comfortable talking about their succession plan? I found that a lot of advisors, especially the more mature advisors, prefer to run their business with keeping the cards close to the chest. It's always been them on their own and that's how they like it. They don't typically like to share very much information and they may not even realize that they have that mentality. So that might be something to ask as you're having some of these conversations around if you ask about the succession plan and they completely shut you down or they avoid the answer, they don't want to answer the question, they may not be comfortable discussing it at all. And if that goes on for a number of years and you're not making any progress, like will you ever make progress is kind of the problem. But even if they are open to talking about it, you still may end up in the same spot, which is where things kind of went with my family because I was asking about an eventual succession plan or how do we get there? And it was like, yeah, someday we got to deal with granddad retiring first. And that was always the priority and it kept getting pushed and pushed. And ultimately, I had to say, you know what, my time is more valuable. I can't sit around waiting for something that may never happen. So I think this is something that came from me reevaluating my professional goals and saying, is this still the right path for myself, my professional development, but also my family, because we kept on waiting for the succession plan and for like the higher salary or an ownership percentage or something that we would need in our financial plan. Like we're not in this to work for free or at a discounted rate. It does have to work for us financially as well. So that became something that was unhealthy in our marriage, just like stringing us along kind of factors. So it was worse because it was family. There's a lot more drama there, but with anyone, if you're waiting and waiting, whether they talk about their succession plan or not, you can set some of those professional boundaries to say, you know what, this isn't meeting my goals for where I need to get with my professional career. And it's no longer a fit. And at that point, it becomes a business conversation of like, this isn't the right business fit anymore. And that's okay. So that's the first kind of self-reflection question under open communication. The second is, is the advisor comfortable talking about your career track leading up to partnership or succession? So after I left my family's firm, I worked for an advisor who made it very clear, like from day one, he had a list of partnership requirements that I needed to have my CFP, which I didn't have yet at the time. And a number of other things, one of which was putting up a dollar amount. If it were like 5% of the business, then it needs to be this. If it were 10% that I want to buy in, then it would have to be double that. So it was clear that there would always be an expected payment to buy in since I didn't come with a book of clients of my own to negotiate with. So if they don't make that clear, then that would be a conversation starter. But you could say, hey, I know it's a long time until you're ever going to be ready to retire. Don't even think about that. But owning, or at least partly owning a business is something that is one of my professional goals. I do think that that would be important to me to have one day in the future. So for me to ever have that here, I would love to know what I need to be working on. Do I need to get my CFP? Do I need to improve my sales or marketing skills? Do I need to build a book of business on my own to prove that I can do this and be successful? What is it that they're looking for? And those conversations can turn into somewhat of a performance review, but it's from the perspective of you're taking the initiative and an ownership mentality towards your own development. And that can be really valuable for an advisor who has had this ownership mentality about their own business and career their whole life, that they see you as an equal. So that's the second talking point. The third is, is the advisor comfortable sharing business information? So that same second advisor that I worked with after leaving my family's firm, he had a folder where he would put all of his annual financial reports for his company, profit and loss, balance sheets, all of that, as well as a regular valuation. And he showed me where that folder was, and he gave me access to it and said, anytime you want to discuss any of this stuff, let's schedule a meeting. I, being really young in my career at the time, I didn't even know where to start. I didn't know what to look for. Great, that's a page full of numbers. But I wasn't ready to buy in. It was still felt like so far away, but I wasn't worried about that. But I, I saw his sharing that information with me as a really good sign that he was comfortable with that. And a lot of advisors aren't. So that's something to kind of explore and ask, like, hey, I'd like to, to, I don't know what it is that you don't have access to, but you can say, hey, I would be interested in seeing our annual financials. Or could you teach me how to read a valuation report? Or do you even have a valuation report? There are lots of different ways that you could start that conversation. And, and it can even come from the perspective of if I were able to help this business owner client with their financial plan, like I need to be able to read their financials. So can you teach me that? And then maybe walk me through yours and see what information you're getting out of these financial reports that maybe I'm not getting. So you could spin it a number of different ways, get creative. So those are the three things to, to ask to see if you have that sense of open communication. The second section is around trust and respect. So the first question being, does the advisor respect your education, professional experience and personal values? And I found that I love my family, but they would totally do this to me or other people in the office where they may make a comment about the way that I would dress. Or I had another advisor I worked for make a comment about how expensive I am as an employee. Like they're not seeing me as an asset in the business. They're seeing me as like this pain point or something that doesn't add value. Another thing might be like my office space, my availability to work or the reason why. For that one, I'm thinking the easy example is like a mom who has maternity leave or has to take her kids to daycare. Like as long as you get your work done, that's what we should be graded on in our performance reviews. So I want my employer or the advisor that I'd like to buy from someday to see that and to not judge me for all of these other factors that I'm also juggling. As long as I get my work done, that's what matters at the end of the day. So those are things to watch for. I felt often early in my career that I would laugh it off. Like it's fine to get made fun of for walking slower because I'm wearing high heels when we're going out to a business dinner, like whatever. Like I can laugh it off. I need to toughen up a little bit anyway. But after a time, it was like, no, that's not okay. And so I think it was that kind of a development in kind of setting boundaries for myself that made me want to include this as something to watch for because especially younger advisors need to be more aware of that. I wish I had been more aware. And the more mature advisors are more callous and they come from a different generation. So they may not even recognize that they're doing something that could be offensive. But when I saw that, I was able to give feedback and say, I don't like it when you talk about me that way. Maybe you could joke about these things. Like I'm totally fine making jokes about like what football team I like. Like, sure, make fun of me for that. That's total joke zone. This, not so much. So you can kind of coach the advisor on what they can talk about with you or what you want them to highlight in front of clients. Like I didn't want them to highlight that I'm a female advisor. I wanted them to highlight that I'd been with the firm for X years and that I have these designations, the things that actually matter. So yeah, I just wanted them to sell me better. And you can coach your advisor on how to do that. But I think if you don't have, if you are feeling like threatened or if you're feeling like you're in that situation, then that may be a sign that the advisor doesn't have trust or respect for you or with you. So that's something to watch for and kind of like internally reflect on. It may not be obvious at first. The second thing would be, does the advisor trust you to provide good service and bring in new clients? So that would be something to just ask. Like I'd like to be successful in this business. Is there like a sales course that you'd want me to take so that you feel more confident that I can do this job and do it well and take care of people or whatever it is? That would be a question to ask. And then the third one, do you trust and respect the advisor personally and professionally? So all of those things that we talked about, like the underlying things that you can start to pick up on about how the advisor actually sees you, you need to be watching yourself and how you actually see the advisor. It's really easy when you start working with someone to be like, yeah, I trust you. I respect you. You're my employer. But if things don't go as expected, you need to kind of get used to standing up for yourself and saying, this is what I believe. This is right. This is wrong. I don't trust you anymore because you did that to me. And it's time for me to move on. And that's OK. But that can be hard. So I had to put that in the article. I don't like talking about it, but it is important. A lot of advisors will accept anything for the chance of a succession plan. But don't let that get to the point where it's not healthy for you, you know, physically healthy or mentally or emotionally healthy or even financially. So lots of things to be aware of and how it impacts your succession plan. I'll fly through these last ones. I'll just call out like any questions. Feel free to throw them in. I'm just going to go through the last section here because I'm not seeing any questions. So on the succession timeline, that's the third category here of things to watch out for. Is the advisor looking forward to retirement? So my granddad, the example I gave earlier, he was not excited about retirement. He didn't have anything to look forward to. So it's easy to brush that off in a meeting with a client and be like, oh, just golf more or whatever. But if the advisor has something to look forward to, you can see like their face lights up and like they're expecting a new grand baby and they're going to get to babysit them three days a week or something, or they're going to buy a boat and spend more time at the lake. And then like, let's make boating plans like after you retire, you can do more stuff with the clients and who knows, maybe even get a prospective client out of it for the firm. But the clients want to see the advisor looking forward to retirement. And if they don't have that, they may not ever retire. So that's something to watch for. Second thing under the section is, is the advisor open to changing operations and delegating their work? Just like they have to have something in retirement, they have to be able to let go of all of the stuff in the business. And especially the small solo advisors who have been doing everything by themselves may not feel like they can let go of control. So that's a lot more difficult. It may not be something that they'll be willing to talk to you about. You could kind of encourage them to talk to some other advisors who have retired or who are working on retiring because they're going to need some kind of a support person to talk them through this and be able to make the change successfully into retirement. And then the last one is, has a recent business valuation even been completed? That's how you can kind of tell if someone is serious about it, is if they're actually taking action to get the business valued, to have the intentional conversations with you. If that's not happening, you could encourage them and say, hey, I'd be interested in getting a business valuation, seeing what the business is worth. Is that something we could work on together? And their answer will tell you what you need to know. So those are the nine points. The three topics in summary are open communication, trust and respect, and sticking to the succession timeline, in addition to the continuity planning that we covered first. So I'm still not seeing any questions. I'll stay on. Aisha, where do we go from here? Yeah. So if you don't have any final thoughts and no one has any other questions, just on behalf of NAPFA Genesis, I'd like to thank you for such an informative presentation and thanks to everyone for attending. And please just remember to complete the survey that's emailed to you after the webinar. Have a great afternoon and remember to find us in Denver if you'll be there. Thanks so much, Brooklyn. Thank you, Aisha.

Aisha Bayless

webinar coordinator

Brooklyn Brock

financial advisor

niche

client acquisition

succession planning

communication

Denver