Unchecked growth of your RIA practice can cause a host of problems for both you and your clients. The smarter strategy is to nurture your expansion at a sustainable level. This foundational approach ensures your business will flourish through anything the future brings.
The digital transformation is in full swing, and the rising cohort of successful tech entrepreneurs want a socially savvy RIA that provides incredible value and concierge service. Here are several simple yet impactful actions that will help you scale your brand at a rate you can sustain.
Build the Framework
“Getting back to basics” is a popular catchphrase these days, but there’s no better place to start getting ready for growth. This is the time to review and reaffirm your core values and mission statement. Knowing exactly what matters most to you will make it easier to attract and retain talent that perfectly aligns with your leadership.
The world has seen more change in the last two and a half years than it had in decades. Trustworthy financial advisors are crucial in these uncertain times and ever-shifting markets. Forging your RIA firm on a rock-solid foundation provides strength and stability for your clients and fertile soil for organic growth.
Create a Flexible Plan
Once you’ve confirmed your raison d’etre, it’s time to sit down and make a long-range plan, with plenty of flexibility for contingencies and new developments. It’s important to set crystal-clear goals on a realistic timeline. Running a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) lets you identify the areas you need to focus on to promote growth — and where you can reduce waste and shed dead weight.
Your five-year roadmap for sustainable growth should include:
- Reachable milestones you can celebrate
- Employee training, retention, and continuing education
- Client relations
- Adapting to current marketing best practices
- Budgeting for new tech
- Infrastructure reinvestment
Embrace change, keep an open mind, and adopt a growth mindset, and your RIA practice will see solid, sustainable results.
Streamline Your Systems
Give yourself bandwidth to grow by simplifying your business and ditching standard operating procedures that are needlessly complicated. If you have a tangle of outdated programs for accounting, customer service, HR, or scheduling, take the time to research your current options, as new software pops up practically every day that can combine multiple functions and make your business more efficient.
A tech stack that lets you be more productive doesn’t have to cost a fortune. There are a few must-haves for any profitable independent RIA. Several options on the market combine client relationship management with email marketing and social media, and various solutions for the entire investment lifecycle and end-to-end management. The wildly popular Salesforce platform offers a whole host of tools in its one-stop-shop specifically for investment advisors. Hubspot is another similar tool that firms have enlisted to serve this need. The best tool, it is often said, is the one you actually use! Short of that, it’s a good practice to review a couple of options before making your selection.
Boost Your Value Proposition
Why should people choose you as their financial guide? What do you offer your clients that no one else can? Your value proposition is the keystone of your marketing strategy. It’s a promise to your customers, the thing that grabs their attention and makes them want to know more about what you can do for them.
Different from a tagline or a catchy slogan, a value proposition needs to be a well-researched and honest statement. Not only will it help you stand out from your competitors, but it also gives your clients a crystal-clear picture of how you can solve their problems and relieve their pain points.
Establish A Frictionless Customer Journey
People hire an RIA because they want someone they can trust to manage their money and increase their net worth. Providing personalized concierge service to every single customer is hard work, but it will pay off exponentially — word of mouth is still the best marketing tool out there today. Referrals from extremely satisfied customers are the number one way to organically scale.
How can you provide this consistently pleasing experience? Your clients should be the top priority in your core values, mission statement, and value proposition. Creating a customer journey map will give you a new perspective and inspire winning strategies for increasing your client base and your revenue.
Leverage Multichannel Communication
Independent RIAs have many benefits for prospective clients over a behemoth investment firm. In these volatile times, customers want more communication and a deeper relationship with their money managers. To achieve that level of availability, you’ll need to have multiple channels open to customer interaction.
No one likes to talk on the phone anymore, but they expect a reply to an email or text. Does your company have a Facebook page, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn profile? These platforms are an inexpensive yet invaluable way to advertise your brand, engage with current and potential clients, and build a stellar reputation.
Huge financial companies aren’t really known for their personalized customer service or the transparency of their business practices. This can be a massive advantage for your organization if you offer openness and honesty to your constituency from the beginning.
Multichannel marketing should be a fundamental element of your sustainable growth plan. Studies show that customers who receive messaging from more than one channel are vastly more engaged than those who don’t. Finely crafted website content, online and social media ads, digital newsletters, and even commercials are all affordable and rewarding ways to reach a much bigger audience and grow your RIA.
Offer In-Demand Insights
ESG (environmental, social, governance) investing is not only vital to our society, but it’s also often an essential policy for people when choosing a financial advisor. They want to put their funds where they’ll work for the greater good while delivering a good return. Over 70% of asset managers incorporate ESG criteria into their investment plans because clients want their investments to reflect their values.
If you’re ready to scale and grow your RIA practice, following these strategies will ensure your growth is rock steady and profitably sustainable.
Want to Keep the Conversation Going?
Growing your business is your ultimate goal, and at Terrana Group we welcome the opportunity to help you build the team you need to succeed. Your employees play an elemental role as you scale, providing your clients with impeccable customer service and freeing you to pursue what really matters.
Over the course of nearly 30 years, we have helped facilitate thousands of professional placements for advisors, with client assets transferred exceeding $67 billion dollars. We have completed placements in almost every major city throughout the United States while building deep relationships with the advisory world’s most sophisticated and notable firms — including Wall Street brokerages as well as most regionals, boutiques, independent brokers, and RIAs. We have a broad knowledge of the deals that are currently being offered and will ensure that you are being presented with the offer which will be best for you.
Confidentiality, professionalism, and respect are protocol to our practices and beliefs; we handle each and every step of the placement process with complete communication, keeping you informed while making the process smoother from beginning to end.
We are proud to always be considered a great asset by our clients because of our proven expertise, many years of knowledge, and acute attention to detail. Financial Advisor Recruiting Services are not all created equal; we guarantee that the TG experience for clients and candidates is always world-class.
We are based in Chicago with a nationwide reach. To get the conversation started, email info@terranagroup.com or give us a call at 312.655.8380 today.
