How do I grow my RIA firm from $85M to $150M? | Ep 12

In this conversation, Stephen Beach and Faustin Weber walk through the exact steps needed to systematically grow an RIA practice.

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Co-Founder Stephen Beach & Strategist Faustin Weber discuss how to grow your RIA firm.

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Transcript:

Stephen Beach: Welcome back to another episode of Craft on Tap, where we talk about growth marketing for RIAs. I am your host, Stephen Beach, one of the co-founders and CEO of Craft Impact. And with me is my co-host, Faustin Weber, one of our marketing strategists.

Today we're gonna talk about a question that came in via our website that I thought would be applicable to our listeners. We had a submission where he said - we'll call him Lance Bass for the sake of this discussion. Lance says: "We have a wealth management firm that serves individuals and families. We have built the firm by being present in communities and meeting people one-on-one. We need a marketing plan to scale from 85 million AUM to 150 million AUM in five years."

Lance, congrats on the smart goal. First of all - specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. We've got a goal, we've got a timeline. I think that's pretty realistic. He says we need a plan, a structure, and a larger online presence.

I thought Faustin and I should talk today about the plan, the structure, and the online presence - where do we even start with that? Not knowing much about Lance's practice, we don't know much about their makeup, their clients, or their prospect list. Just talk us through where do we start, what questions do we need to ask ourselves and what questions do we need to ask Lance once we get on a call together.

Faustin Weber: Yeah, I guess we want to assume pretty much since everyone in the RIA space wants to go for the 1 million and above net worth prospects, let's just go ahead and say that, between 1 million and 5 million.

I think the best place to start, and I don't know how much this firm has already talked through their overall business strategy on who they want to go after, what's their typical client that they would like to help. But I would look first just at your own client base and start trying to break down or segment your own client base based on how do those individuals fit into which type of group of people or persona. I've seen "avatar" being used a lot to describe a persona - the old marketing term persona.

So I would look and see - because I imagine you've built a community with a lot of different professionals. You start off with your group of friends, your group of family members, and they refer you, and then you have a series of engineers and lawyers and different executives and pre-retirees. And so you just got this big hodgepodge that brings up your practice.

So I think just breaking down those individuals and starting to group them - how many of these are pre-retirees? How many of these are business executives? How many of these are attorneys? How many of these are tech professionals that have different equity compensation needs?

I think that's a good starting point. And then not so much just on profession, but also based on the different challenges that they have. So I think that's a key part of thinking through your overall marketing strategy of how you're gonna get that 150 million - just figuring out what kind of solution you provide that can be different than other advisory firms that are offering a similar type of solution, trying to serve a similar type of audience.

So, thinking not so much in terms of the profession of your current client base, but how their needs can be grouped or categorized into the specific challenges they have. Do you think that would be a good place to start, just starting with your own client base? Stephen, what are your thoughts on that?

Stephen Beach: That'd be to me the most efficient, smartest place to start. We've tested a lot of different things with different RIAs with digital marketing campaigns, and we always come back to: start with your clients. Market to your clients before you market to strangers.

I think that's what we found. We spend a lot of time on thinking through how do we market best to our clients? How do we increase the client service level for your clients? And the word of mouth and the referrals will be coming regardless. But the more you focus on that, hopefully what we're trying to do is increase that - increase the word of mouth and the number of referrals in an incremental way.

So yeah, I think that's a great place to start.

Faustin Weber: 

Yeah, and I think too, like once you get that breakdown of the different types of personas or avatars and then their unique challenges, you can start to see what gives you the most opportunity as a firm to hit that five year goal. Because if you have 30 or 40% that are business owners. For instance, you say, okay, well maybe business owners is the way that I want to go, but I also know business owners are more of a long-term play, right? They don't have necessarily a lot of revenue that they're gonna be able to give you, in terms of investible assets right now. But they might in five to 10 to 15 years versus an executive, they're gonna potentially have more assets that's, shorter term revenue for your firm. So you start to have these kinds of conversations. And I think I would advocate for whoever that client or client group is that you have a high percentage of. And then you start to look at like. You need to do a little bit of market research, right?

We start looking around like, okay, that particular group of clients, are there enough of them if we want to really limit ourselves to them? Are they wealthy enough, continually wealthy enough, right? In terms of their typical career, and then. In the space, are there other RIAs that are marketing specifically to them? And then how do we offer a solution that's a little bit different, or how do we do it better? Or how do we have the expertise that's able to deliver a better experience or, and I think, I think about, you know, one of our clients who focuses a lot on, you know, professionals in their thirties and forties that might not have that high net worth right now. But they have high, they're more of like the Henrys, right? Like not quite rich yet.

But they have equity compensation and they built their entire firm and grown exponentially based on being able to serve this equity comp. type challenge in a unique way and better than everyone else. And so they've been able to really like double down on that group. And so I would say for your firm at 85 million, like you might not have one group that really rises to the top in your clients, but if you do, that might be the best place to start.

Because being able to create content, and we'll talk about content here in a second, but being able to fully articulate exactly how you solve all their challenges. You're going to, it's gonna resonate very well with your current client base that fits that niche. And then they're gonna be able to better refer out to their colleagues and to their people in their close circle that might have the same sort of challenges. 

Stephen Beach: They're in a more kind of qualified space to be able to refer then, too. I mean, they would run in the same circles, right? It would stand to reason that they would be running around in the same circles. Also too, if you look at the 85 million in a AUM, I don't know how many households that is. Say that's 100 households right now, maybe a little less. Try to pin it down. I mean, really what we're trying to do is say, you know, and I keep going back to the word avatar. I can't stop thinking about the Pixar movie Avatar once you said Avatar. But, I think you might struggle with it, to pick out kind of a group of folks, and you might come up with maybe three different groups. So it could be that, out of those hundred households, you might have a group you would call pre-retirees. You might have a group that are, let's just say dentists. You have four dentists in there. And then let's say you have another one that's business owners.

Those are pretty broad, right? So I think from there you could try to pin down more. Ask yourself questions and ask your CFPs and ask your staff questions like, you know, who do we really enjoy working with? Where do we think we have the most upside? Where do we think we can help the most? Where do we think we're the most unique, in solving these challenges for them? And so that might help you.

But I think the challenge would be, try to pin it down to one avatar, one specific set of challenges that those people have, and then pin it down to one unique solution that you kind of have packaged together that solves that challenge for them. And that's what we start with? And then we have the backup avatar and the Plan B avatar and the Plan C avatar.

We can always run marketing campaigns towards those folks as well. And use the data that comes back to make a more informed decision on what's my niche going forward that's gonna allow me to get to the 150. You could build three different marketing campaigns. Each one has one specific persona, one set of challenges who you solve for in a very specific way. You do that three times and then you could create a unique campaign for each one of those.

The goal there would be testing your marketing messaging, testing the channels, testing the engagement, you know that you're getting out of these different campaigns to then eliminate two of those three and double down on the one that's performing best. And then kind of run faster with that niche. So that's how I would start to think about it. 

Faustin Weber: I like the simplicity of the one problem, one solution, right? One persona. I would say that. You know, we work with a lot of referral coaches in the space that work with some of our clients, and one of the things they really advocate for is having feedback sessions with your clients, like, or add a feedback component to your agenda when you have your quarterly or biannual meetings and really ask, like be point blank about how you're doing and use any sort of positive response or positive results in how they're talking to help them think about similar people that in their orbit or network, that you might be able to help as well. And I think that's a great part about having a larger percentage of clients that are in that audience that you want to go after. That one persona, that one challenge, that one solution is that you can just build that into your normal client service routine, to be able to ask them and to be able to set up those referrals.

I think one thing we need to talk about, Stephen, is just how you position yourself. Like once you choose that, whatever that niche is, and how you update your website, how you update your social platform. So can you maybe just talk a little bit about like, how do you see the website changing of your firm once you've made this decision that you're gonna try to get over the next five years with this one avatar? With this one persona? How do you structure your website? What do you change, how do you deal with your social platforms?

Stephen Beach: Yeah, that's a great question. I just talked with someone looking to make a change with their positioning, which includes messaging and visual branding, to be more focused on, you know, women as breadwinners. So that's, that's what they wanna shift into. As a business, they've made that decision, like as a leadership team, they've already committed to that. They're, they're full bore, ready to rock. So we kinda have a green light there. Sometime firms might not be all on the same page as far as that goes. They might be several partners or co-founders involved that all have, equal weight as far as decisions. So I think you gotta ask yourselves, your business partners. Do we need, can we say we pick a niche? Let's just say it's a dentist. You know, Lance Bass wants to serve dentists. Hopefully everyone's following this, ridiculous hypothetical. But, Lance Bass is a specialist in financial advising and wealth management for dentists. And so that's what he wants to try, but he also has 96 other clients that he doesn't want to alienate. Again, the avatar reference. So we don't want to alienate those folks. And if you get a good referral from somebody who's not a dentist, who has over a million in liquid assets, who's seemingly a good fit to work with you, would you really say no to that person? No. You'd probably say yes depending on the connection to the firm and so on. So I think there's a balance there.

There's a spectrum. So on the far left side we're just gonna add this avatar page to our website, but it kind of mixes in with 15 other pages and maybe three other avatars that we already have that are up and running. Because we don't want to alienate anyone. We wanna show if the dentist comes to the website, there's a spot for him or her on the website. That's great. But we also don't want to say like, we're saying no to everybody else. Or, on the far side of the spectrum, is change the whole website to be all about wealth management for dentists, and that's fine too. 

Faustin Weber: We've done both, both ways. 

Stephen Beach: We've done it both ways and there's, there's a whole spectrum there. I think you can go, you can go anywhere. Kinda splitting those two extremes..

Stephen Beach: I think it needs to start though from kind of like the leadership standpoint, like the business planning side, determining what your strategic plan is as a firm. And if you don't have that figured out yet, I think some of our messaging workshops would help ask the right questions. But, we're not business consultants. I just think that sometimes you gotta ask the question, get it in front of the group, and then, batter it around a little bit and then, and then you can come up with a pretty clear answer.

Faustin Weber: Yeah.

Stephen Beach: So the answer is, it depends. It's really driven by the leadership team. And then the marketing should be reflective of kind of the business goals and the real business plan that's put together.

Faustin Weber: So yeah, we've definitely seen it both ways where like the entire, the firm changes their entire website to sell out towards, you know, you keep using the, example from the the original Kitces niche article around dentists, which is great. But we've seen websites that completely sell out. With their site, in a good way. And that's really powerful. I mean, it can be really powerful where you can just have services for that particular niche, you know? But we've also seen, to your point, that we just have like a persona or avatar page where it talks through the challenges.

You just need something on your website where if somebody does get that referral from your current clients or when you start to publish all your wonderful content and drive a lot of interest and intrigue to your site. They need to be able to identify themselves, in some way and be able to see themselves clicking in. Because I think that's a key component of differentiating you from others that they might be either comparing in the space or that they might be considering.

So I think that's an important component. I would really lean into for your social profiles, I don't think you need to worry so much about alienating your current clients, on your LinkedIn or Instagram profiles, really talking about how you help that particular audience that you're going after. I think that can be done without having any issues from anybody in your current clientele.

A client that I was just talking to who's completely sold out, he was kind of joking with me that he doesn't even think his current clients know that he's going after this other niche. You know, because they just had a 10, 15 year relationship with them and it's been great. And they don't even go to the website or even care, like they're just meeting with him. I don't think you need to worry necessarily about your profiles. I do think there's important thing.

We need to talk about this, Stephen, and that's like, okay, so you've decided the women breadwinners. I would say we might need to narrow down a little bit more than that if we're gonna have successful marketing campaign, but we need to see where our audience is living, right? Like, so we got our website updated. We need to see how our audience is consuming content, like: Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on social? Which platforms are they on? Are they on Instagram? Do they peruse Reddit threads? Is our niche, does it already have like a subreddit community that has a really vibrant presence where they're asking financial questions.I was digging into a group for a client, where I realized there were all sorts of these great Facebook groups, these vibrant 11 to 20,000 person communities that were just focused on finances for this group. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is phenomenal. Like, we gotta break into there.

So I do think there's a component of trying to figure out now, okay, so what's our plan to get to 150 million? We've decided on our niche. We are gonna start marketing to our current clients, making sure we're asking for referrals, but then let's see where our audience is engaging, outside of that. And then what you can do is think through, I would say, your challenges that they face, categorize them into the different categories of, okay, they really struggle with this thing as it comes to healthcare, but then they have this benefits package that has a really high amount of bonus that needs to be a accounted for in terms of the tax planning. And they're always asking this question about work-life burnout and how their finances can be taken off from them and categorize your challenges.

And that allows you to go in and start scraping questions from the internet. I'll say the internet, but Reddit, Quora, other social platforms. And then once you're able to have that information categorized and you're able to have those challenges, then you can start thinking about, okay, how do I solve all of those potential issues? And that really becomes your content marketing plan to try to engage those communities on whatever platform you've discovered, or whatever community you've discovered that they live. So I would say that that's like a key component is just figuring out what their challenges are, what they're asking about, what they care about. And that's hard to do if you don't have a lot of clients in that space because you can't just interview them. But I think you can do a lot of internet research, especially with the AI tools you can use now to scrape all this data. It can give you a good like content plan moving forward.

Stephen Beach: Say like, ask Perplexity or Claude or ChatGPT. Go tell me all the common questions that dentists are asking in online forums and social media communities around finances and, wealth management, and financial planning. Then bring back your results with citations from where you found it, something like that. And then you could go dig into each of those, each of those sites or each of those platforms and try to find more specifics or like really try to like understand their language, how they're asking it.

Faustin Weber: Yeah, and I would just go one step further than that. I would have the challenges that you specifically feel like they have as a starting point for the AI search. And then you can have it, give it that context before, because then it'll give you a lot better information across the different communities. 

Stephen Beach: One other thing too I was thinking about as you were talking is, I think it's really important as a firm owner or managing partner or co-founder, we're thinking about this. Where do we position ourselves on the spectrum with this niche, and how seriously do we wanna implement around the niche as far as like our messaging and our brand and everything like that.

And I do think there's a key point in here if we shift our thinking, like not just from us, from the firm side, you gotta do your business planning from the firm side, but also think about it like from the buyer side, from the prospect side, they've got a referral, you know, to you Lance, and then they got a referral to the next advisor and the next advisor, and they pull up your websites right, all next to each other. And one of 'em says, wealth management for dentists, we've solved all these common challenges and here's how we tackle it and here's what it looks like. And the other ones are, you know, wealth management for entrepreneurs, families, dentists, women and business owners. Those are the two other websites. You're already kind of a leg up if you position yourself being so dedicated to the niche of dentists. Some people would say, I want somebody who kind of has expertise, broadly across different types of folks and whatnot. But I think most people would say, financial advisor is the first one. Right? It's the one that really understands dentistry and understands the unique challenges inside of here. And the other guys say they do, but I'm not really sure. And they kind of do a lot of other stuff as well. So I think, I just wanna come back to that.

Faustin Weber: Yeah.

Stephen Beach: Let's think about it from their side, like how are they gonna look at whatever you're presenting them. That could be your website, of course, would be the biggest one. Could be your LinkedIn tagline, could be your job title. Even putting something about the niche and the title or underneath your company tagline, like something like that where they would see it, you know, in an email signature and on social media platforms and things, and kind of just give you a little bit of a leg up, you know, to get that person thinking like, oh, they really get me, like they're speaking directly to me. You know, that's valuable and that's one of the ways that you can stand out, right? Because there is a lot of competition. And folks are evaluating other financial advisors, not just you. So try to think about it from their perspective as well. Just wanted to add that in there.

Faustin Weber: Yeah. I guess shifting gears a little bit towards, like, okay, so you have your challenges, you have your potential content plan, but, who's gonna see your content? Who's gonna see your postings? I would say you gotta think of, all right, there's people out there on whatever platforms for where your niche is consuming information, whether it be Instagram or Reddit, or media publications. There's platforms where people do have your audience in their following.

And so you gotta figure out what is my "in" with some of these influencers, for lack of a better term, what is my in with, you know, the moderators in the Reddit community? How do I get in to the space where we can figure out some sort of collaboration opportunity? Perhaps it's a podcast that you're running or that you want to start, where then you want to spotlight these individuals that fit into the same niche as who you're going after, right?

And you start to try to find people in the space that have 10, 20, 30, 40,000 followers that you can interview. Get your get exposure in that way, where they're gonna share clips from the podcast and get really excited about being interviewed. Maybe it's a really insightful way that you answer Redditers' questions on a subreddit where people are engaging. It's figuring out these little ways of getting your content, your brand, your personal brand in front of these audiences. And you have to use the network. You have to find that leverage with the bigger influencers or else it's gonna just feel like a never ending grind, I guess I would say. 

Stephen Beach: It's almost like growth hacking your way into awareness. If you just change your website and change your social platforms and change your taglines everywhere, and you update it and you only had a couple hundred visitors to your website in the first place. Guess what? Nothing's gonna change. It's basically, even if we do everything right from an SEO perspective, right, it's just not gonna make a dent, It's like putting a beautiful billboard out in the desert somewhere. So you have to think outside the box. How do you demonstrate your expertise and the fact that you know this audience forwards and backwards and you know how to solve their unique challenges. How do you demonstrate that in front of a larger group?

Faustin Weber: And let's maybe not even speak in generalities or hypotheticals anymore. I'm just thinking of a particular client who's been going after dentists, right. And he's been trying to go after these five year time horizon to retirement dentists for the last year. He's built out an entire podcast to focus on these dentists, and put his entire website focused on these people, these dentists coming to his site and trying to get them to potentially become a client. He wants them to be a million dollars just like the individual, the first person who posed the question. Lance Bass. And he has not had any success, right. Gets like very low engagement on all of his podcasts. Gets pretty low engagement on his posts. He has done a lot of things like tried to connect with people on Instagram, tried to connect people on LinkedIn. He's pulled lists, he's tried to do outreach to lists of dentists in the local area. Nationally, he goes to trade shows for dentists trying to get people to engage with him. So he's done all that he possibly can, right? From his perspective.

But I think you have to even growth hack more than that, right? I think you have to think of like, okay, those influencers, alright, let me look up the top 30 influencers on Instagram that all fit in that dentist designation. I want to try to figure out some way of getting them in my podcast so that I can feature them not just on my channels, but giving them something that they want to feature me on, on their channels, right?

So you can go on that route. You can look through the Facebook groups where different members of dentistry are engaging. I found a couple of really fantastic groups that are all focused on financial questions that dentists have, but you can't just get into that group because they're private. 

And they have moderators that potentially kick you out. So now I'm thinking, okay, how can I put myself in a good position with the moderator to try to feature her in a way that gets her to have a relationship with my client so that then she wants to invite him in to answer the financial questions on Facebook. Now, all of a sudden, I'm in front of a qualified audience, so my thought was if I get these younger Instagram influencers that are all focused on this audience, I can leverage the spotlight and the success with them in this older clientele on Facebook.

So this just gives you an example, there is a level of growth hacking if you're thinking about trying to break into a new niche, that's really important. If you're just thinking, I'm gonna buy a list and I'm gonna try to do outreach to these people, or I'm just gonna connect with them on LinkedIn, or I'm just gonna post great content, it's not gonna happen. Or it could happen, but you're gonna have to post every day on LinkedIn for the next year and a half to two years. But even then, if you're not commenting on other people's posts, you're just gonna run into a real standstill and you're gonna get frustrated 'cause you're gonna invest a lot of time and energy. So these are just some of like ideas on how you can growth hack. You just gotta get in with somebody else who already has that audience. Does that make sense?

Stephen Beach: A hundred percent. This is COI marketing, but it's outside of the traditional COIs, which is, you know, estate attorneys and CPAs. That's what everyone know is COI marketing. So it's like COI marketing slash influencer marketing. We're trying to hack away to bigger brand awareness quicker, with the dentistry in general.

Faustin Weber: And it just comes back to relationships, right? Like, can you build relationships with new types of COIs, not just the financial related COIs? Can you figure out a clever way to get in front of them?

Stephen Beach: And when you go to that moderator, what do you say to the moderator? You gotta give the moderator something that he finds valuable. You can't just say, Hey moderator, can I come in there so I can put my ad in your big Facebook group that you've spent years developing? That's not gonna work. You have to figure out how you can add value for free. Like a free course on wealth management or common pitfalls a dentist faces with wealth management that you can send - a top 10 and what you do about each one. And it becomes this comprehensive guide and it's 10 pages long and you give it to her with no strings attached. Like, Hey, hopefully this is helpful for your audience. Or, some kind of prerecorded video where you're talking through those same things, you give it to her and you don't ask for her to promote you in any way. It's just, Hey, hopefully this is helpful. If not, then I'd love to do something that keys in on more of the challenges that your audience has. I'm happy to do that. Something like that. You gotta give them some value on the front end. Otherwise you'll hear crickets and then you'll still be kind of pedaling your wheels a little bit with not a lot to show for it.

Faustin Weber: You just think of it as like a self-serving thing. These individuals that you're trying to get to. You want to figure out what you can give them to serve their needs, like what they actually care about. And a lot of times if you're a big influencer, you want to be selling something, right? So you gotta figure out how you can put them in a position to better sell or promote their product. And that, in turn, is gonna get you where you want to go.

Stephen Beach: Right. Love it. Well hopefully you're welcome. Lance Bass. I think the path to 150 million is a little bit more clear now. We've still gotta document it, test some things and then come back to it. We'll do that in 90-day increments, and hopefully, everyone else enjoyed listening to this, so thanks so much.

Faustin Weber: All right. Thank you.

Key Takeaways:

• Start with your current clients. Market to your existing clients to generate more word-of-mouth referrals before targeting new ones.

• Define your ideal client. Segment your current client base to identify groups (or "personas") based on their professions and unique challenges.

• Focus on a niche. Choose a specific client persona that offers the most growth potential and create content that addresses their challenges to resonate with that audience.

• Update your online presence. Modify your website and social media to reflect your chosen niche, showing your expertise and helping potential clients see themselves in your services.

• Get in front of new people. "Growth hack" your way to new clients by collaborating with influencers or community moderators who already have a following in your niche

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This conversation is only a starting point. For ongoing insights and practical strategies for RIA growth, listen to the new Craft on Tap marketing podcast. Available now, wherever you find your podcasts. Ready to chat? Get in Touch

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