Due Diligence Spreadsheet + A/B/C Segmentation
Corey: your spreadsheet right when you were trying to figure out you know who was going to come with you and who wasn’t going to come with you can you just talk about that a little bit because I’ve recommended that to almost every financial advisor that I’ve worked with since
Unknown: yeah I think I think this was the best thing that we did so essentially we broke every family into three categories um a b and c
Podcast Opening + Guest Intro
Unknown: hey everyone Corey Whalen managing director Bridge Mark strategies thank you so much for taking the time to listen to this podcast today wanted to have my friend Nick Nielsen on the line today he just celebrated his fifth year on the independent side and while going through the due diligence process with him I’ve never seen a financial advisor take a plan and truly implement it as good as he did in terms of how he was going to grow on the independent side um at his fifth year mark so um incredibly impressed and Nick I really appreciate you being on the on the podcast today
Unknown: hey Corey it’s an absolute pleasure uh hopefully some of your listeners out there can take a few of the things that I did apply it to their own practices and when they make that transition to Independence which virtually everyone will ultimately do they do it better than I did
Unknown: that’s great I really appreciate it Nick if you don’t mind just just tell the audience a little about yourself
Background + Personal Story
Unknown: sure 511 215 spelled pounds uh originally grew up in Southern Indiana I’m a Hoosier at heart I love Small Town Country Vibes so clearly that led me to Charlotte North Carolina um it’s it’s not real rational but I’m a country kid at heart uh moved out to Lancaster South Carolina a couple years ago my wife and I have been fortunate enough we adopted three awesome kiddos from South Korea so that’s a very important part of our life but love financial planning once I got out of college I knew that I wanted to be a financial planner I took a really long and unusual path to get to where I am today but with my business partner Jeff Walters we founded know my plan a little over five years ago now
Unknown: awesome so number one I didn’t know that you can use quarter inches so now I’m five seven and three quarters
Unknown: so exactly exactly don’t short yourself if you if you don’t mind just kind of tell the the audience kind of you know what your what your journey has been just from like one firm to another uh
Career Path Through Banks
Unknown: yes I mean I I started out as a bank teller um at Fifth Third Bank right out of college it was literally the only job I could get in financial services all of the other you know main places that hire everybody with the polls told me no I didn’t understand why they needed me to call 200 of my friends and family I thought they had the big buildings and trillions of dollars I thought they would have people for me to call but that that’s not exactly the way the world Works um so I started as a as a bank teller and got into bank management became a licensed Banker I was a licensed Banker for eight years really that was the greatest blessing that ever happened to me in my career I had a bank bank branch manager named Janice who absolutely poured into me she reviewed every client conversation that I had she wasn’t really in a client-facing role but she poured into me and wanted to make sure that I was having great holistic conversations that would ultimately get me to a position where I could be a finance advisor and so after eight years as a licensed Banker became a financial advisor at PNC Bank when PNC acquired the Royal Bank of Canada that’s what brought me to the Carolinas I was there for about 18 months had an amazing opportunity with SunTrust to joined SunTrust in in 2014 was there for three and a half years and just reached a point where Independence was really the only viable option for the future
Five Years Independent + Favorite Benefits
Unknown: right so I I mentioned this before Nick but we we just celebrated your your fifth anniversary uh a couple a couple months ago you know together just just looking back over the last five years it’s it’s my job to help financial advisors kind of understand some of the benefits when you’re making a move from an employee firm to an independent firm but I’m just curious from from your experience what have been some of the favorite things making a move from one channel to another
Unknown: Yeah by far the best part of it is being able to create your own content like that was one of the things that was the big why there were some other reasons but the big reason was we wanted to be able to control how we marketed being inside of a bank Channel you are there to help the bank branches meet their goals and ultimately help people in that process and some of those people weren’t ideal fits for how we wanted to grow a business and going independent allowed us to Market to the people that we wanted to Market to but also it ensured that we could take control of those relationships long term and I say that to me that we would never be in a situation where a client would become so big that we would have to hand them off to a wealth management or a trust Department a client would never be so small that we would have to transition them to an 800 number so whether someone had ten thousand dollars or 10 million dollars they would be our client so we get to choose whether we love the families that we work with and if we do we really don’t care how much money that they have if we’re committing to that client that we’re going to be their financial planners we want to honor that commitment for as long as they’ll allow us to be their guide
Niche + Ideal Client Profile
Unknown: what your what Your Niche is a little bit because I think that that um really relates especially to you like having some of those minimum restrictions how you’ve just been able to take full advantage of your Niche now
Unknown: and so I had an old manager who said that if you do the job well eventually your client base will start to look like you and I think that’s very true and I think we learned or I learned early on in the process when we began marketing that it attracted a certain type of person so the niche kind of found us but essentially we work with sales Executives who are 35 to 50 years old and if I close my eyes I can see them it’s a 38 and a 40 year old couple and they generally have two to three kids a golden doodle and most of them have a Honda Odyssey minivans are very popular um in our in our client base so it’s generally households who have annual income above 250 000 and we love that 35 to 50 year old client because we’re going through a lot of the same life events together we’re kind of doing life together
Unknown: that’s great and and I can just see how you know there’s people that are that they’re getting hockey stick trajectory inside of their their their income and their career and maybe they just don’t have the money yet and that could have been restricting
Unknown: yeah and the bank we would refer those people as Henry’s right High earners not rich yet and I remember you know there were times where you know I would have to go to my manager and say hey I really want to work with this family and they would say well they only have you know sixty thousand dollars in an investment account so yeah but their household income is six hundred thousand dollars and this is a client that I want to work with for the next 30 Years and they’re great people and we have similar values and our families look alike and these are people that I want to grow with sorry it’s going to go to the 800 number yeah so we want to contr we wanted to control the people that we work with and we want to invest in those people together over the next 30 Years and build real lasting meaningful relationships
Marketing + Value Proposition + Content
Unknown: financial advisors all the time Nick and that when they’re considering making a move from an employee Channel you know has Big Brand um they’re just concerned how am I going to recreate myself and continue to grow on the independent side and I talked about it in the in the intro the podcast but I just think you’ve done such a good job of wetting your value proposition just shine through to you know your community from a marketing standpoint can you just kind of talk about that and like in the impact it’s had on your business
Unknown: yeah so I would say the first thing is you’re going to have to have a little bit of thick skin because some people are clients of the Big Brand and that’s okay you know some of the people who we thought were our a clients who would follow us anywhere told us no and they’re like you know hey Nick hey Jeff I’m sorry but at the end of the day I’m going to stay at this Bank forever regardless of who the financial advisor is so step one you got to have some thick skin step two there is an endless opportunity of people who exist who want advice and guidance who may or may not know that they want advice and guidance but they exist and there’s more money flowing through to people than we’ve ever seen in the United States before if you’re willing to speak to a individual Niche or a group of people the opportunity is is infinite you can never serve all of the people who could truly benefit from your guidance during your lifetime so I think it’s just having an abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset and if you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing as a financial planner wherever you’re doing it the the majority of the people will make that transition with you
Unknown: that’s great and I mean I I I’ve seen it us both being in in the Charlotte area I’ve just seen what an impact your marketing has done not only with your current clients but with prospective clients but also just some of the centers of influence out there as well that wouldn’t have really known how Nick Nielsen is different or how he works with his clients and I I could just imagine your your referrals have gone through the roof
Unknown: yeah certainly with cois um that has helped but in inside of a you know employee model it’s really hard to get your message out there at scale of how you work with people you’re going to be doing a lot of CPA luncheons to explain your process and how you work with people as opposed to you know making posts on LinkedIn or other social media platforms explaining your process and now all of a sudden thousands of people are seeing your process on a daily basis and you keep showing up and that’s the beauty of the social media platform is you keep showing up and people get to learn about you a little bit every day through some sort of micro app action or micro nugget and you’re not out there doing all of the um COI events and things of that nature but you know we had people that we had known whether they’re CPAs or estate planning attorneys that never referred to us ever before who started referring to us once we were independent yeah I said well you know we’re more comfortable referring to an independent advisor versus means you know someone you know attached to an institution that was one of the feedback you know that we got and then I think clients clients have become more comfortable you know in referring to us as well being independent knowing that we’re not tied to any institution and you know we can set we can tell people like you know hey this might be a credit card to consider this might these might be a couple places to consider for a mortgage and lo and behold it’s not the same name that would have been attached to insert Big Brand Institution
Communication During Volatility + Trust
Unknown: one more specific thing I’ll just add about the marketing and and the communication I mentioned this in another podcast but I’m an investor myself and when the market was super volatile a couple months ago I mean I was having a stressful day just thinking about it and I know a lot of financial advisors and I get a lot of newsletters some from an employee firm some from independent firms and I got one from a big box firm and it was the CIO giving a capital markets update and I kind of just looked right past it I didn’t know that person it probably had a lot of great information in there to make me feel at ease but I didn’t I just went right past it and then I talked about someone’s newsletter that I know and trust and when I read their newsletter it was in their worth and as I was reading it I was hearing it in their voice as someone that I know and trust is saying this is why you have a financial plan you know this is why this is why things are going to be okay and I I I I feel your stress right now and it just made me feel so much better than any unknown person at the top of a research Department could ever make me feel so I just thought it was super powerful
Unknown: yeah absolutely and you know those people who are cios um technically you know know a whole lot more about how the markets work and can give you a much deeper breadth of economic perspective probably than your average financial planner but I think you know financial planners throughout the industry they really underestimate the power of using you know your own words because I love to create my own content because I want people to kind of fall in love with me and my thought process and I want our clients to think like yeah I believe in that I understand that that makes sense to me I don’t want somebody else I don’t want to use somebody else’s words because I don’t want somebody to fall in love with the CIO and then they come in and they meet with me and there’s a disconnect because that’s not how I speak that’s not my Cadence that’s not exactly my investment beliefs so you know part of the whole process is you’re going to alienate some people you’re going to make some people mad and there’s going to be people who don’t want to do business with you but if you’re not repelling people you’re probably also not attracting people and the only way that you’re going to find that out is you have to put your viewpoints you have to put your process and how you help people out in the world and by and large what I have found is that when the time is right people will self-select and they’ll send you a message say hey Nick I think that’s really interesting I liked your thoughts on this I’d love to meet with you and before you know it more clients come in the door and you’re growing your business and you don’t need the big institution to you know send you referrals or have uh potential clients to call upon
The Moment to Change + Gradual Pressure
Unknown: so most financial advisors that I speak with there’s like a very specific moment where kind of a light bulb goes off and they realize that they need to make a change you know was there anything specific like that for you that made you to say I need to start looking or was it more gradual
Unknown: yeah I think I think it was gradual I think it was really you know death by a thousand paper cuts there was a substantial amount of leadership change within a couple of years it’s kind of like who was at the top um who was at the top of the bank and all of them had kind of a different regime change that came in so it was always kind of like a constant flux and then there were several scenarios where we did more Revenue but made less money and no financial advisor wants to you know have Revenue go up and income go down um so it’s just kind of the slicing away at the grid having to do the same to make the same money and you know really you know my business partner Jeff credit to him he was really the one he became frustrated quicker than I was and it was pretty much it reached the point where I was either going to have to break up with him or we were going to have to go somewhere else and that’s really what led to us doing our due diligence and you know meeting with all of the firms that existed on Earth and you know thank goodness we met you in the process
Misconceptions + The “29%” Myth
Unknown: there’s obviously a lot of misconceptions out there in the industry about making a move from one firm to another I try to tell advisors this this all the time there’s people that have a heavy vested interest in keeping you in the current seat that you’re at that sometimes give misconceptions out there and then there’s also all different types of firms out there that are also heavily invested in in you coming to their specific firms so I’m was there anything that you heard out there
Unknown: oh yeah yeah yeah there’s one there’s one and I can I can still remember the exact statistic um and this one stressed me out beyond all belief and um even there’s a really good recruiters out there one was a young lady who had developed a good relationship with and she probably called on me for two years and she always quoted the statistic is that you know Bank advisors should never go banked independent they should go bank to bank or Bank the wire because when Bank advisors leave to go independent the staff that they always quoted was 29 that’s the percentage of the assets that will actually transfer over and you know when Jeff and I were doing our calculus we’re like you know can we make this work if 29 of our clients come with us like what does that look like yeah if you know 29 comes with us I mean that’s that’s that’s That’s pretty drastic so we did the math we thought we could make it work we were confident that you know we would at least hit that number and um but yeah it scared us to death they referred us you know kind of within hierarchies of their organization and spoke to the president CEO of that group and said like yeah no one does better than 29 that’s your that’s your max that’s as good as it gets you know a better option would be to transition to this other bank and um you know we met with some local independent advisors and you know talked about their net payouts and stuff like that all right we can make 29 work you know lo and behold we took you know roughly around 70 percent of assets with us and I will tell you that of all of the people that we know who have made that transition from bank to Independent after us is that all of them did better than that nobody that I’ve ever seen go banked independent took less than 70 percent of their clients with them maybe I just run in really good circles but I I would imagine that the average um advisor in a bank program that leaves to go independent is going to be able to take you know around 70 percent of their assets and clients with them
What You Told Clients
Unknown: what did you what did you tell your clients when when you transitioned like I I think a lot of financial advisors when I’m helping them through the process like they just don’t they just can’t picture how that conversation went what what did you tell them
Unknown: yeah and obviously we we would have done some things different you know today versus how we how we did a thing we probably made it a little bit too complicated for our clients um to understand and maybe that was just with our own lack of understanding of going from bank to Independence but you know the the main thing was just hitting on the fact is that we wanted to own the relationship with them in perpetuity we never wanted to be in that situation that we felt was very likely in the bank that we would have to hand you off at some point to The Wealth Management Department or the opposite send you to an 800 number like we couldn’t predict if that would happen or when it would happen but we felt that if we did our job and we followed the plan the vast majority of our best clients we’re eventually going to get handed over to the wealth management department that was our real our real fear that we faced and we didn’t want to play within a certain box of having to be told like these are the people that you can work with these are the people that you have to refer up or refer down and I think clients were pretty you know receptive to that we made it too complicated but in a nutshell that’s what we said
Advisor Trust + “Name on the Back of the Jersey”
Unknown: I hear that a lot as feedback you know financial advisors just think and rehearse about you know this big elaborate reason why they’re making a move to another firm and I just helped another financial advisor a couple weeks ago he’s been serving his clients for 20 years and just through his own his elaborate explanation of moving from a wire house to Independence most of his clients just stopped him and just said you know your your family you’ve been with us for for 20 years I I know that what you’re doing is is in our best interest and and we’re going to go where you go which I just thought was so cool to hear it’s it’s kind of like if like if you’re a LeBron James fan you know you don’t care that he was a Cav or he’s on the Heat or he’s on the Lakers right you’re just like a LeBron James fan like whatever team he’s on that’s your guy and I and maybe that’s a really bad analogy with LeBron James I saw a lot of Jersey burning when that happened there was some Jersey burning for sure but uh you know most I would say most of the people if you do a great job people are in it for the name on the back of the jersey and not the name on the front of the Jersey
Unknown: yeah and you know there’s a lot of horror stories out there with you know bad financial planners and you know the things that have happened um over the last 20 years or so if someone has a great financial planner that they love and they’ve been working with with years for years you know they will follow that person more often than not
Client Reactions: Three Buckets
Unknown: what were your clients reaction when you made a move from a Big Brand to you know a firm that just doesn’t spend a lot of money on a brand that just kind of lets your brand shine through what were their reactions
Unknown: yeah so I think most people were really excited there was a segment it was kind of like three buckets there’s probably 60 we’re super excited that’s great what do we need to do this is incredible we’re so happy for you um the second group is like who’s that I’ve never heard of them and like that was like a little bit of education and like oh you know you know they’re the they’re the custodian or they’re the broker dealer this is what their role is in the process but at the end of the day you’re still working with Nick and Jeff and there was the uh the third group it was like yeah uh that’s cool I hate that you’re leaving we’re gonna stay at the bank because we’re always going to stay at the bank that was really the three um those are the three reactions group a easy easy transition you know um that was great B was an educational opportunity to get them comfortable most of those people eventually came some of them did not
Due Diligence Spreadsheet: Probabilities + Invitation List
Unknown: so I remember when you were thinking through your your due diligence process you you were telling me about your spreadsheet right when you were trying to figure out you know who was going to come with you and who wasn’t going to come with you can you just talk about that a little bit because I’ve recommended that to almost every financial advisor that I’ve worked with since
Unknown: yeah I think I think this was the best thing that we did so essentially we broke every family into three categories um a b and c and a was this person is a hundred percent coming with us there’s no way that they’re not going to come with us we have an amazing relationship with them there was that Rapport there like these people are family and then we assigned an 80 probability that it would happen because we knew that some of those people weren’t going to come with us yeah uh we didn’t know who but we knew that there would be some and so we just we took an 80 probability we put their you know assets under management and one column and then next column we would put you know their average annualized revenue um Group B was you know we have a pretty good relationship with these people it’s certainly not at the level of a that we meet with them regularly they take our advice um we we assigned a 40 probability to group b and then C is you know these people don’t meet with us regularly their communication is pretty poor when we give them advice it’s kind of it’s kind of 50 50 on whether they actually applied or not we’re going to apply a 10 probability um to to group C and like we decided who was going to be in a b or c those were going to be the people that we extended an invitation to and obviously there was people that we didn’t extend an invitation to um you know when we left and I will tell you that number was spot on and for other advisors that I’ve encouraged to go through that process their number has been very close to when they’ve ultimately made that transition
Looking Back: What You’d Do Differently
Unknown: so Nick when I’m working with advisors I I always just try to learn from other financial advisors mistakes and try to help them work through not making the same ones in in their transition you know looking back over the last five years what do you think you would have done differently
Unknown: yeah so the first thing that we would have done differently is we would not have gone to our rias like TurnKey DBA um that was a mistake that added a layer of complexity to the process that was confusing for our clients and then being on a website with other advisors and our clients just didn’t get it and it was confusing it was very hard to explain like yes we’re independent business owners we have our own little fiefdom and yeah there’s 50 other guys that have done the same thing and they have their own little fights and it has the exact same name and we’re related yet we have no idea what each other’s doing so that was that was confusing I wouldn’t have done that um the second thing was I did a uh so we would have taken a little bit of time on the front end figured out the brand which we ultimately came to as a know my plan which happened you know shortly shortly thereafter which is a huge um huge benefit for us because the ultimate thing was we wanted our clients to be able to say I know my plans we thought the name made sense doesn’t make a lot of sense from SEO purposes but we like the end result we spent a lot of money on a website that we probably didn’t need to do we we set some money on fire there when um when we first started we hired a company to help us with um with lead gen and like social media posts and we’re like oh you know here’s a guy in Atlanta who’s grown this multi-million dollar independent practice doing this this seems like a good thing and they’ll get some leads in we want to we want to do this well we’re still waiting for that first lead it hasn’t happened and then um you know the other thing that we did is we signed up with Ramsey’s smart investor Pro like you know hey these are good people that are wanting advice and guidance went in completely blind didn’t have the infrastructure set up and we only did that for a few months before we were able to turn it off but you know once again we never even had a conversation with with anyone from that from that program so we definitely set some money on fire and I think you know just allocate yourself you know twenty thousand dollars twenty five thousand dollars that you’re gonna set on fire I mean that’s that’s part of the learning curve is you have to learn and you got to make some mistakes to figure out what works
What Worked: Virtual Growth + Nationwide Clients
Unknown: the the thing that worked incredibly well for us that came from that is and part of this was was coveted in the pandemic but was the transition of people’s willingness to meet virtually and to do Zoom appointments because now people were seeing our content from all over the United States people were comfortably working virtually and now we started getting clients from you know from Boston and Oklahoma and Oregon and Florida and that Texas so that was that was really a huge change which has really helped our business to flourish but those were the key things those were the key mistakes that we made which ultimately helped us figure out what does work
Advice: Questions to Ask + Work With an Unbiased Expert
Unknown: Nick for financial advisors that are considering potentially moving to another firm what questions would you recommend that they ask themselves to determine if a good move is a good fit or not
Unknown: this this is going to come off as a little bit of I don’t know this may not come off right I’m just going to say it the one thing that I wish we would have done differently and saved ourselves literally hundreds of hours hundreds is I wish I would have met with someone exactly like you in your current role today that was completely independent and unattached to the outcome that didn’t have a vested interest of if I ended up at a wire house or a bank program or an independent Channel I wish I just could have gone in had a conversation with you and said Corey this is exactly what we’re looking for or what we think we’re looking for here’s our trailing 12 numbers these this is what our client base looks like this is how we manage money like I’ll sign a limited power of attorney go find us the two or three best possible fits and then let’s come back and let’s have individual meetings with them let’s go through the pros and cons of each and then let’s collaboratively come to a decision the the Stress and Anxiety that was caused by meeting with 15 different firms and looking at 15 different offers over 45 to 60 different lunches um was completely unnecessary so the number one thing that I would tell anybody at a bank or a wire house today or anybody an independent spot that’s truly not independent find yourself a quarry who can save hours of time stress you know the average life expectancy of a financial advisor is not that long it’s just the reality of it it’s not good and I think a lot of it is we put a lot of stress on ourselves instead of Outsourcing to experts who could really help us and you know today you were in a position at bridgemark where you can truly help add years on to a financial advisor’s Life by removing an incredible amount of stress because if an offer comes back and you know it’s a bad offer you can work directly with who that offer came from be like hey I know this is a bad offer I know you can do better than this because I’ve had three other offers that look like this the advisor doesn’t have to hear all that yeah the advisor doesn’t know if it’s a good offer or a bad offer but you do so I mean that’s the number one thing that advisors need to do is they need to find experts and Surround themselves with experts and there is no advisor that’s going to be more of an expert on M A or current advisor transitions than someone like yourself so stop pretending that you are an expert and find find Corey or find your Corey
Debunking the Myth + Do It Now
Unknown: I would have told you that you would have brought a lot more than uh 30 of your practice that’s for sure I would have debunked that myth immediately so yeah I mean we were scared to death
Unknown: yeah I mean we we were scared to death yeah you know we were we were absolutely scared to death that our income was going to drop whatever 50 because we’re only going to take you know 29 30 of our our book was we never would have you know we were hopeful because we went through that spreadsheet process we were hopeful that we would bring 70 and we did but once again that was not a tried and true method that was just me sitting down with a spreadsheet and arbitrarily uh plugging in numbers and hoping that it worked and you know maybe I dreamed it into fruition but it but it happened um but I would say too is our transition was really rough because this was right during the transition of um people doing business and paper versus people doing e-signature and so we did everything as a paper transition which you would never have to deal with today so it’s never been easier to make a transition than it is today and if if you’re a 500 000 producer an 800 000 producer um do it today don’t wait make the transition it’s never it’s never going to be easier than it is today because you’re going to get more clients more complex situations just just do it now don’t wait if you’re at a if you’re at a place where you know you’re ultimately going to have to make a move proactively make the move every year that you wait it becomes exponentially harder and you’re adding stress and probably reducing your life expectancy do it quick rip the Band-Aid
Younger Advisor Realization
Unknown: I just spoke with an advisor today that is probably 28 years old at an employee Channel and he just realized exactly what you just said he said listen I know I’m only you know seven years into the industry but I know I’m going to be looking back in 20 years when I have a two million dollar practice and it’s going to be that much more stressful and I’m just going to regret it and I just thought that was such a mature thing to say um and I’m I’m glad you came up to that conclusion but Nick I appreciate it you and Jeff have done such awesome things in the last five years and uh I can’t wait to have a 10th year anniversary call to to see what’s next but uh I appreciate it so much and thanks for the time
Closing
Unknown: anytime thanks Corey
