Scaling to $2 Billion of Organic Growth. How One Advisor Did It.

How did one advisory firm go from $200 million in AUM to $2 billion in under five years? I'm going to share four takeaways from a Michael Kitces Financial Advisor Success podcast, where he interviews James Bogart of Bogart Wealth. They discussed the exact things that James did to make this happen.

The podcast is almost two hours long, but it was so valuable. I wanted to summarize it and a few key takeaways to hopefully save you some time. And if you read this and the topic is of interest to you, I’d encourage you to listen to the whole thing; it’s episode 243.

Education

The word that came up the most in the first few minutes of the interview was that James focused on education. He said being educators is absolutely what caused a lot of the growth to start. They focused on teaching and helping their target clients. But they had to do a few things before they were able to do this successfully.

Niche

One of those things that was essential was choosing the core group that the firm wanted to help. They narrowed down who they wanted to help and then focused on specific content that was very valuable to that target client or target prospect.

We’ve heard this before and it’s not a coincidence that some of the most successful advisors are able to choose their niche and focus on them before they start to see growth. An absolute great way to increase your value is to find out what’s most important to your target clients and what their common problems are. Then just get really good at solving that problem for them. James said that by doing this, they ended up creating custom solutions, which he called products, that were unique to his clients and prospects. By having these multiple products that solve multiple common problems, James was able to increase the perceived value of his firm.

If you’re interested in learning how to use the Advisor Value Formula to plug in your own services and increase your perceived value, click here for a free training.

One-to-Many

Another key James mentioned that contributed to his firm’s success was that he focused on educating using a one-to-many technique. They didn’t just do one-to-one meetings, or even one-to-30 dinner seminars. They spent time on something that was much more scalable: webinars that could be one-to-hundreds, or even one-to-thousands. What this did was not only increase the number of prospective clients that the firm was helping at once, it really opened up the location of where clients were coming from. Not long ago, they were were localized, but once they started using one-to-many education practices, they opened up to people across the US.

I can share firsthand the power of this one-to-many education. We started our Streamline Financial YouTube channel not too long ago and now the majority of the new clients we are working with are not from our state.

Consistency

The fourth thing I want to highlight is an area where I have seen a lot of advisors fail, and that is consistency. James said this was very important to their success, but it took a few years of getting just ok results with their education and teaching practices before things hit a tipping point for them.

The same thing happened for our YouTube channel. We started in May and by December we had 70 subscribers. It took eight months to get those first 70. Then, in the following eight months we went from 70 subscribers to 6,000. Then, just three months after that, it doubled again to 12,000.

I know that one of the barriers to consistent content creation for advisors is just the lack of time. And because of this, I created a content system that I will be sharing with a few select advisors. If you’re interested in that, click here to find out how you can get multiple pieces of content to use yourself.