Do you want to earn $1 million or more every year as a financial advisor? We’re talking about earning at these levels no matter how the markets are performing or how the economy is doing. If your answer is yes, then keep reading.
There are several proven strategies you can implement to enable you to consistently earn at least $1 million year in and year out. While there are various ways to generate the requisite revenues to garner these income levels, here we’ll address some more effective and powerful ones.
Adopt a multi-family office business model. Increasingly the wealthy and ultra-wealthy are choosing to work with multi-family offices. The benefits of creating a multi-family office are the opportunity to work with wealthier clients, do more for them, and, significantly, a significant persistent uptick in revenues.
The optimal approach for many financial advisors is to create a high-caliber resource network that can be tapped as needed. This makes your multi-family office a variable-cost operation and permits you to provide a broad array of expertise to those clients for whom they’re appropriate, which is likely not all of them.
Develop a dual-impact brand. More than ever, for financial advisors, branding is essential to any viable business development initiative. However, unless you’re focused on developing a dual-impact brand, you’re likely missing a tremendous opportunity to connect with potential wealthy clients.
With a dual-impact brand, you’re not only effectively positioning yourself to affluent individuals, wealthy business owners, charitable organizations and the like but also to key referral sources. You need to highlight your technical knowledge and capabilities for both audiences. In addition, for key referral sources, you also need to communicate how working with you supports their business development activities.
Establishing a well-run nodal network. For most financial advisors, networking is running around, seeing many people, and occasionally picking up a new client. With nodal networking, you identify a handful of top-quality exceptional referral sources and establish a solid relationship with them. Consequently, they each become a pipeline of new preferred clients for your services and products.
The key to establishing a high-caliber nodal network is adroitly screening potential referral sources to ensure they have the types of clients you’re interested in and can send them your way. Also, during the screening, you learn about their practices, empowering you to determine the economic glue you’ll need to make them a consistent source of new business.
Become an industry thought leader. Most financial advisors look the same. However, being a recognized authority for your expertise, knowledge and insights regarding a particular market niche is a very potent way to meaningfully grow your financial advisory business and do so quickly.
To be an industry thought leader, you have to inform high-potential prospects and clients that you have the insights and solutions they can seriously benefit them. This can be communicated in various ways, from reports and articles to webinars and conference presentations. Very importantly, beyond explaining the value and added value you provide, you have to be able to seriously monetize this expert positioning.
These four strategies are highly synergistic; in many scenarios, implementing them concurrently is almost obligatory. For example, developing a dual-impact brand and becoming a thought leader work best in concert. Along the same lines, in establishing a high-caliber nodal network, you can use thought leadership as a form of “currency,” resulting in a steady stream of new, highly profitable clients without ever providing clients in return.
Russ Alan Prince is the executive director of Private Wealth magazine and chief content officer for High-Net-Worth Genius. He consults with family offices, the wealthy, fast-tracking entrepreneurs and select professionals.
