Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Hosted by Financial Advisor Coach, Ray Sclafani, "Building The Billion Dollar Business" is the ultimate podcast for financial advisors seeking to elevate their practice. Each episode features deep dives into actionable advice and exclusive interviews with top professionals in the financial services industry. Tune in to unlock your potential and build a successful, enduring financial advisory practice.
Ray Sclafani (00:00.142)
Welcome to Building the Billion Dollar Business, the podcast where we dive deep into the strategies, insights, and stories behind the world's most successful financial advisors and introduce content and actionable ideas to fuel your growth. Together, we'll unlock the methods, tactics, and mindset shifts that set the top 1 % apart from the rest. I'm Ray Sclafani and I'll be your host.
Today, we're talking about one of the most misunderstood and most mismanaged aspects of our profession, and that's growth. Not just growth for growth sake, not vanity metrics. I'm talking about intentional growth that creates real value for your clients. So let's start with one simple truth. When advisory firms grow without intention, they create complexity. When they grow with intention, they create value.
If you're leading a financial advisory firm today, chances are your business is growing. New assets, new clients, new team members, the numbers are moving in the right direction. But here's the trap. Growth without design is chaos. It creates operational drag, weakens client experience, and puts your firm at risk of becoming bloated, not better. Let me say it plainly. You can scale without growing and go bankrupt.
scaling processes by adding people, implementing software and expanding footprint without corresponding value creation is a formula for insolvency, not enterprise value. Because growth isn't the same thing as progress, and it sure as heck isn't the same thing as purpose. So let's call it what it is. Haphazard growth. It's an epidemic in our industry. It's the firm that adds clients but doesn't segment them. It's the practice that hires younger advisors
Ray Sclafani (01:50.104)
but doesn't have a talent development pipeline. It's the founder who adds services without clarifying the client value proposition. Haphazard growth is reactive. It's opportunity chasing and over time, it creates a service model that's uneven, a team that's unclear on roles and a book of business that's more of a burden than a blessing. Worst of all, it erodes client trust.
because clients can feel when the firm's focus has shifted from serving them to surviving them. Let's reframe the conversation. What's the value of growth for clients? Because when done well, growth isn't just a business strategy, it's a real client benefit. Growth lets you hire better talent, professionals with deeper specialties, broader capabilities and greater capacity. Growth allows you to refine your service tiers.
ensuring that clients are getting exactly what they need when they need it and not a generic mass market experience. And growth enables you to invest in better technology, streamline your workflows, and deepen the planning conversations you're having with clients. And here's the kicker, growth fuels relevance. If your firm isn't growing, it's dying. And in a world where client expectations evolve every quarter, standing still is like falling behind.
Your best clients, the ones who expect excellence, want to be with a firm that's going somewhere, a firm that gets sharper over time, that reinvests and reinvents itself so that better service emerges, better thinking, better performance results. Here's the pivot. Intentional growth requires a scale plan. Without it, you're just winging it. And in a firm that's hitting 5 million, 10 million, or 50 million in revenue, winging it
is malpractice. So what goes into an intentional scale plan? Here are five things you might think about. First, you have to identify who are you built to serve best. This is segmentation with teeth, not tears. Second, define your ideal service model, not just what clients receive, but how it's delivered, who delivers it, how success is measured. Three, map your capacity model.
Ray Sclafani (04:07.768)
How much can each advisor team or pod handle before service quality slips? Four, outline your talent pipeline. Who are you developing? What are their career paths? How do you retain them? What's your hiring and recruiting strategy? Five, connect growth to impact. Every strategic hire, every dollar reinvested, every expansion should tie back to client outcomes. And finally, it's communicated.
clearly, proactively, repeatedly to your clients. Your teams co-created the plan. Now it's time to communicate it to your clients. You'd be shocked how many firms grow silently. They invest in new capabilities, build new models or improve technology and never say a word. That is a missed opportunity. Clients deserve to know how your growth benefits them. They should feel it. They should see it. They should hear it from your team members. Here's what it might sound like.
Mr. Mrs. Lubner, we've added two new specialists to the team this year, one in estate planning and one in business exit strategy, so that we can go even deeper in the areas that matter most to you. Or something like, as we've grown, we've implemented a new client engagement process. This ensures that every team member of your service team knows your goals, your history and your plans, and that you're getting proactive advice all year long.
See, this kind of language and messaging reinsures clients that you're not grown away from them, you're growing for them. Let me leave you with this. The advisory firms that win in the next decade won't be the biggest. They'll be the most intentional. Intentional about who they serve, intentional about how they scale, and intentional about how they tie growth back to the one thing that truly matters, the client experience. So if you're growing,
pause and ask, is this growth aligned with our purpose? Is it improving client outcomes? And are we communicating it in a way that builds trust and excitement? Because if you're not, it's not growth, it's just noise. Now with each episode, we provide these future oriented coaching questions to help drive reflection and action. from today's episode. There are three coaching questions today. First,
Ray Sclafani (06:32.994)
How is your current growth strategy directly enhancing the client experience? And how are you making that value visible to the client? Two, where are you scaling operations or adding complexity without a clear connection to client impact or revenue profitability? Three, what would you say your clients say they've gained from your firm's growth over the past 12 to 24 months? And what do want them to say a year from now? Well, thanks for tuning in and that's a wrap.
Until next time, this is Ray Sclafani. Keep building, growing, and striving for greatness. Together, we'll redefine what's possible in the world of wealth management. Be sure to check back for our latest episode and article.