5 MIN READ
As an independent financial advisor, you likely have a to-do list that seemingly never ends. Staying up to date with your reading likely gets pushed to the bottom, if it makes the cut at all. With so much content produced on a daily basis, just shifting through the noise can be time-consuming.
So we've done the heavy-lifting for you. Let's just say that when it comes to creating compelling, informative, and leading-edge content for financial advisors, we know a guy. These must-read posts from XYPN co-founder Michael Kitces's popular blog, Nerd's Eye View, will, in true Kitces fashion, offer more expertise than you know what to do with yet still leave you hungry for more.
"The AUM model for financial advisors has experienced tremendous growth over the past 20 years, from the rise of the independent RIA to the broker-dealer shift to fee-based accounts. And despite the rise of critics questioning whether the AUM model is the most effective way to align what the client pays with the value being provided, the accelerating momentum of major firms transitioning to the model suggests that not only is the AUM model here to stay… but there may soon be too many financial advisors using the same AUM model to pursue the same relatively-few households who have sufficient liquid assets available to invest and who are actually willing to delegate them to an advisor in the first place. In fact, if the entire advisory community makes the AUM shift all at once, there may be no more than about 23 clients per advisor available!"
"For more than 20 years, industry benchmarking studies have helped financial advisors understand how to manage the profitability of their businesses, and ensure that the costs to service clients are in line with the fees they’re being charged. However, remarkably little research has been done into the costs that must be incurred to actually obtain those clients in the first place and the cost-effectiveness of various client acquisition strategies that financial advisors use.
And it turns out those client acquisition costs are substantial!"
"Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the practice of trying to maximizing how often a website comes up at the top of search engine results for various keywords, increasing the number of website users to visit a particular website (i.e., website traffic), and ideally bringing visitors who are part of an appropriately targeted audience (and thus are likely to find value in the website and decide to do business). Which is a valuable marketing strategy for financial advisors to make themselves “findable” for consumers who are seeking out a financial advisor to work with (or more generally, someone who can help them with whatever financial problems they’re searching online for answers to!)."
The fiduciary distinction for RIAs wasn’t originally intended to be a marketing differentiator for advice, though. Its roots lie in the fact that RIAs were created from the start to be providers of investment advice, while broker-dealers originally were created to play a vital role in the capital formation and capital markets process (which included selling investments, in the form of stocks and bonds to prospective investors, often underwritten by the broker-dealer’s investment banking division). For which RIAs were subject to a fiduciary standard – as the providers of advice – while broker-dealers were subject to a lower suitability standard consistent with the sales-centric role they were created to fulfill."
"The rise of the asset-under-management (AUM) model has driven a concomitant shift in financial advisors to focus increasingly on Baby Boomer retirees – for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: “That’s where the money is.” To the point that some in the industry have raised the question of whether the pendulum is swinging too far to retirees, and that it’s time to start doing more financial planning for next-generation clients as well.
Except the challenge for most advisory firms is that it’s not profitable to do financial planning for younger clients, who simply don’t have sufficiently-sized investment accounts to generate enough AUM fees for the advisory firm to deliver the advice."
"As more and more people earn their CFP certification and become financial planners, the mere fact that one is a financial planner is no longer the differentiator that it once was. In turn, financial planners find themselves increasingly compelled to focus into a niche where it’s easier to stand out and win clients… being a generalist may bring a lot of prospects but few clients, while settling into a niche may narrow the field of prospects but results in an incredibly high likelihood that clients (in the niche) will say yes and choose to do business.
Of course, a niche is not just conceived overnight; in practice, it’s established and refined over time."
"For many businesses and industries, it’s crucial to do a proper analysis up front to estimate the size of the “target market” – how many total potential customers are there and how much would they spend on your products or services, so the company can figure out if there’s a big enough market opportunity amongst those tens or hundreds of thousands of consumers (or more) to make it worthwhile to launch that new product or service for them.
In the context of a financial advisor, though, the reality is that the sheer intensiveness of the time it takes to serve financial planning clients in an ongoing advice relationship means most advisors will struggle to ever handle more than about 50-100 “real” client relationships on an ongoing basis."
