…
This is the Transition To RIA Vendor Profile Series where we take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On this episode:
Vendor name:
Flat Fee Advisor Marketing
Vendor category:
Marketing
Episode host:
Brad Wales
Episode guest:
Sara Grillo
Vendor contact info:
Full Transcript:
Brad Wales – Hi, I’m Brad Wales with Transition to RIA and this is the Transition to RIA Vendor Profile Series, where we look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On today’s episode, we’re answering the question, “What is Flat Fee Advisor Marketing?” And to help us with that is Sara Grillo. Sara, thanks for coming on.
Sara Grillo – Thanks so much for having me, Brad.
Brad – Always a joy for those folks that might have seen my other series I’ve had Sara on before. For anyone that knows Sara, it’s always a fun, enjoyable, and informative conversation. I think today will be right down that path as well. So while we’re talking about a specific offer that Sara has, dubbed Flat Fee Advisor Marketing, for those that know Sara, she’s been in the marketing game in our industry for quite some time and helps advisors in a number of different ways.
We’re gonna go down the path mostly on the Flat Fee Advisor Marketing but Sara, if you want to give us kind of an overview of your different offerings, I think that would be helpful. And then like I said, we’ll kind of get focused on one of them.
Sara – Sure. Well, the first thing I offer everybody is a subscription to my daily newsletter. If you go to my website, it’s Saragrillo.com, you could just sign up for it. I don’t charge anybody to read this, but this is what I want to give to the whole world.
I love writing my daily newsletter. I answer one tip, one marketing question from the audience of my followers every day. So it could be a little thing like, ”How often should I send an email newsletter to my prospects?” or it could be “Should I text or should I call to follow up with somebody who I’ve been trying to get to meet with me?”.
I love writing this newsletter and I feel it’s my calling that I was put on earth to write it. So everybody, this is for you. I created this for the world. Please visit my website and sign up for the newsletter and send me some questions.
Now, as a service provider, I’m a marketing consultant and I help RIA firms, also some hybrids and even some insurance agents. But really my specialty is with the RIA firms to market themselves in a way that’s natural and makes them not sound like they’re selling washing machines.
I think everybody dislikes sounding like they’re selling something or being pushy. My approach that I’ve been able to help people with is to focus on connection and, most importantly, to put the emphasis on them and listening to them and understanding them. This is something that is reverse or opposite from the way that marketing is taught, which is very pushy. This is a more patient approach that I’m teaching.
It might not get you a gazillion results on day one, but I think most of us will agree that we’re not in the business for just two years. Most of us work with families and a lot of the advisors I have talked to really love their clients.
They love them. They don’t want to see them come and go. They want to work with them and their families and all of their friends. So this approach that I’m espousing and that I’m teaching to people and that I’m helping them with in their marketing is definitely not for the person that wants to meet the quota on day one and day 30.
This approach is for the person that wants to build a community and more importantly has a true mission that they feel in their heart. They have a gift that they want to give to the world and want to do this correctly in a way that involves proper communication, a lot of empathy, and a lot of listening. It’s just a humble approach, I would say. It’s not for everybody, but the people that are onto it really do tend to like it.
Brad – I encourage everyone to go sign up for the email. We’ll mention it again at the end. We’ll put it in the show notes.
For those folks that are not yet in the RIA model, you’ll hear me chat on all the episodes I make about one of the benefits of going in the RIA model is the additional flexibility you have on multiple fronts. One of those areas of flexibility is often how you can market your services.
So I would just warn you, if you are in a very captive environment, you should still sign up for Sara’s email, but that will start getting you thinking, wow, there are people out there being able to do these things and these great ideas. It will motivate you even further perhaps to explore a particular RIA path.
I know your ideas are not exclusively or solely only something RIAs can do, but clearly there’s more flexibility usually with that path.
Certainly sign up, but buyer beware, as an advisor, you might get awfully excited about the idea of possibly implementing some of these things.
Sara – I actually have a fair amount of dual-registered reps that read the newsletter. And there’s not as much flexibility when people are under the broker-dealer model exclusively, but if they’re dual registered, I’ve seen a lot of really good marketing by like Raymond James reps. I have seen like even LPL.
I’ve seen that the reins are definitely loosening. This is not 10 years ago and the internet is too powerful a force and the companies recognize that. Not everyone does, but a lot of them do. The wirehouses not so much. I think if you’re at a wirehouse, that’s gonna be tough. The marketing is going to have to be really different.
Brad – I think to the degree you can, for whatever solutions you need out there as an advisor, if you can use industry-specific experts, it’s best to do so.
Not to disparage the local marketing company down the street from you, but Sara’s aware of perhaps some extra hurdles that have to be managed through with some of the affiliation models or whatnot where someone that’s not in our industry might have great market ideas, but doesn’t realistically know what may or may not actually work on the ground here. So I appreciate that.
And then Sara, let’s jump into specifically Flat Fee Advisor Marketing. As a guy that called his company Transition to RIA, I of course love a descriptive name. So I think we could guess at what you are, who you are looking to help with that offering. But if you could just give us your explanation of who that appeals to and what exactly you help them with.
Sara – So Flat Fee Advisor Marketing actually started by accident, to tell you the truth. What happened was I had always been kind of snarky and questioning, and I had always been kind of up in arms about the lack of transparency in our industry.
As a marketing person, I would always see these sales pitches. I was really at the hub of communication for a lot of advisors and for a lot of the larger companies. I just was like this is such a load of garbage, you know, and I would always post on the internet about it.
So Scott Salaski and I did a podcast called “Direct Indexing Sucks” and that podcast actually ended up going kind of viral. We had an interaction on Twitter. Then a reporter picked it up and we both ended up getting interviewed and it caused quite a stir. And the next thing I know, I’m getting all of these advisors that are chiming in on social media.
So I started this movement called the Transparent Advisor Movement. We started having these meetups of all these people that were just like,”Yeah, it’s not fair that people don’t disclose their commissions.”, or ”It’s not fair that people don’t disclose the fees on their website.”, or “Hey, when I was at a wirehouse, they told me to go put a client in a private REIT and half my clients didn’t even know it six months later.” and this and that.
There were all kinds of stories coming out of this on social media. And I was like, wow. So we started having these meetups just for these advisors that really wanted to be more transparent. This was around the same time about three years ago that flat fees were becoming more popular.
So I have directories of flat fee advisors now, but in the beginning it was only a few people that were going forth and saying, “I’m not gonna charge on AUM. I don’t charge commissions. I’m a fee-only RIA firm. I’m going to charge you $10,000 a year, and I’m going to do the wealth management. It’s going to include the investments and it’s also going to include the financial planning and any of the work that we would do with your estate attorney or with your CPA, all for one flat fee. Maybe we’ll have to revise it in three years if inflation comes up too much, and that’s written into the agreement.“ For the most part, you have advisors out there that are just giving a quote of a hard dollar amount. And the prospects really love it. It’s especially popular with the up-and-coming generations.
In addition, there are advisors that are charging hourly fees. This was a model that was pioneered by the Garrett Planning Network several years ago, and it’s still around. It’s gaining traction as well because of the emphasis that has come in the industry on financial planning versus investment management. The up-and-coming generations can get their investment advice off of podcasts. There’s these copy trading platforms where you could go and pay 35 dollars a month and you could copy what the hedge funds or the big equity portfolio managers are doing.
There’s also a lot more tech savvy in the population than there used to be so people can run their own portfolios. Really, if you are just running a buy-and-hold strategy or some basic active management strategy, it’s getting harder and harder to get 1%. Over 1% is also very difficult. You really have to be commanding value that goes just past, here’s these five ETFs or here’s this index that replicates the S&P 500. I’ll run this for you for 100 basis points. I’ll do all the trades. I’ll make sure the Confirms come in. People can do that on their own a lot of times.
It’s different if we’re talking about a concentrated position that somebody has 90% of their portfolio in a company stock they need to unwind using options. It’s different if someone comes to you and says, I want you to make me 30% a year. It’s different if somebody says, I have a gazillion like run-ups of 30% on every single position in my portfolio and I need a tax loss harvest out.
The majority of the time, this is not the case, let’s be honest. The majority of the time is the retiree next door that used to work at GE and their wife who’s a Voorhees, New Jersey school teacher and they have a 401k and they’ve got some taxable accounts, they’ve got a million or two million and they just want to take their grandchildren to Disneyland.
Really, let’s be honest, most of this stuff is plain Jane stuff. And you’re going to say though, oh no, not in my business. Okay. Well, maybe you could be a flat fee advisor then for the anomaly events. Like maybe, I mean, there are flat fee advisors. This is the thing that people are getting wrong. People are thinking, well, I can’t be flat fee because I don’t want to be charitable with my work. I don’t want to be a nonprofit. Guess what? There’s flat fee advisors that are charging $30,000, $40,000 a year.
They’re doing advanced planning. They are enrolled agents or they are CPAs that are also financial planners and they are getting these clients from the big wirehouses that are not getting any tax planning and they’re just putting up a stake in the ground and saying, I will tell you when you can take social security. I will help you to tax loss harvest. I will do all the tax planning for your business exit.
They’re working and I’ve had actually, because I’m spearheading this movement, I’ve had people contact me. Let me tell you something, the people that are interested in the flat fees and the hourly fees, these are not $30,000 AUM people. These are people with five million, ten million dollars. Own a business, sold the business. I mean these people have a mega amount of wealth and that’s because a flat fee generally works better the more assets you have.
If I have $200,000 to my name, I’m not going to be paying a financial advisor $5,000 a year, and I’m making $100,000 a year. I’m not going to be paying out of my portfolio when my portfolio is $300,000. $5,000 to you a year, sorry, I’m not doing that. It’s unconscionable, and no regulator would allow that.
So it’s really popular, though, with the people that have 20 million with that wirehouse and they’re paying the wirehouse person $4,000 a month and they don’t even know what they’re getting. They don’t even know they’re being charged this. I mean, this is a huge threat, everybody.
The moment some flappy advisor comes along and waves it in their face that I charge $10,000 a year, how much does your financial advisor charge? Oh, I don’t know. And then you better hope that they don’t go home and look at their statement and find out that there’s $4,000, $3,000 coming out of their portfolio a month that they didn’t even realize because if they do that, you’re toast.
You are toast because it’s not just the transparency, it’s the lack of control. They don’t want to control everything. They’re not going to give you a cookie cutter solution. They’re not going to try to prescribe a lot of the ways of working together that you would be restricted to in a lot of these models.
So there’s a lot of freedom and flexibility that the RIA firms are using and they’re being transparent in how they communicate with you, how they serve you, all of these things that a lot of the typical traditional firms cannot offer. it’s catching on with the affluent people everybody. This is not just for the broke college kids
Brad – This is one thing I love and am obviously very passionate about, and I know you’re passionate about marketing for it. I don’t know if this was part of your original kind of vision on this, but besides just helping folks that want to go down this path and do the flat fee approach and how to market those services, you’re the common denominator in hundreds of conversations about this.
So you are learning what other advisors are doing and how much they’re charging and you can in turn give that information to other advisors that are saying “Okay, how much should I charge or what is reasonable for the services I have to provide?” I think there’s a lot of value in that just being, again, the common denominator from having so many different conversations about this. So that goes beyond just the pure marketing part.
So what is the offering for someone that does like this, does say I want to learn, I want to implement this perhaps with some of my clients, maybe all of my clients? Are you a consultant per se to say, here’s how to transition your practice or are you, hey, let’s do it and let me help you with how to message that or what is kind of the deliverable, if you will?
Sara – So one of the advantages of being an RIA firm, and especially with this flat fee model, is that a lot of these flat fee advisors are independent. They’re solopreneurs, one- or two- person shops. That makes them very nimble. They can use a lot of personality, have a lot of flair in their marketing. There’s also more of, you see more niche concentrations with these folks. And they’re also able to access the internet very easily in terms of being able to market. The internet is a huge mechanism in their marketing, whereas it’s not with some of these other advisors that operate in a compliance-heavy, restricted environment.
So the offering is one that I designed for somebody who might be starting out and hasn’t really scaled yet, hasn’t hired another advisor. They are looking to deliver upon their mission of delivering transparent advice that’s more logical and fair to the consumer. And for that, the services come at a slightly lower price point than my suite of offerings do for other types of advisors.
So I have to verify everybody that signs up. And most of the time, I know the people who are in my flat fee community. We have transparency meetups once a month. Let me know about that if you’d like to come. It’s transparentfinancialadvisor.com. That’s our transparency website.
But basically, I have to verify that the person is a flat fee advisor. By the way, I also have hourly advisor marketing. I also have advice-only marketing, which is advice only for people that’ll say, ”I’m just gonna do the financial planning. To heck with the trading, I’m not even gonna take custody of your assets. No discretion.”
We will screen share and I will tell you the trades to make, but I’m just gonna charge you for the planning and you can come back next year and we’ll deliver it again. So these services though do come at a slightly lower price point because I do wanna be accommodative to the folks that have taken the hard road.
And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a hard road. Like I said, you have people that are, after they get themselves established, making, 200, 300, 400 thousand.
There are a lot of practices that have not scaled. These firms, I’ve seen so many of them ramp up so quickly because there’s such a high demand for this, to put your hand in the air and say “I’ll charge you 250 an hour, 300 an hour, and I’ll tell you when you should take your social security.” Nobody’s doing that. Everybody wants “Transfer your assets over and I’ll charge you 1% and I’ll map it out on the sufficient frontier.” Okay, no one’s doing 300 bucks for a social security analysis.
My services for Flat Fee Advisor Marketing start at 50 bucks a month. You get a webinar and I write content for you that you can post onto the internet. You could use it as an email newsletter. You can use it as a PDF follow-up tool with clients. It’s versatile.
And for an additional $200 a month, so for a total of $250, you could get one half-hour coaching session with me. Sometimes we run a little bit over a half hour, because you know, I do tend to enjoy the people that I work with. Not everybody [laughs], for the record, but a lot of the people. Most of the people I work with, I really enjoy.
So the coaching package that can be tacked onto it provides a little more guidance, if you are looking for that, and helps people stay accountable. I think a lot of times advisors get very intimidated by marketing because they feel it’s this whole thing where they have to go climb up Mount Everest. And having somebody there to guide them is a lot of times really useful.
I think it’s reasonably priced. However, I’m biased because it is my service. Some people might say 250 bucks a month is a lot of money for what you’re offering. And I get that.
Aside from that I have advisor marketing solutions that are on my website that do come in a little bit of a higher price point and are a little bit more involved.
For some people, they start out with me on Flat Fee Advisor Marketing or on one of my other lower price-point products. Then, and this has happened numerous times, they say wait, that’s not enough. I don’t need coaching. I need you to actually do it for me. I’m a ghostwriter. I produce social media content, blogs. I could be a chief marketing officer too, like outsourced style. Okay.
But that’s not what Flat Fee Advisor Marketing is. I’m catering to the flat fee advisors because I want people to feel, sorry for this word because I feel like it’s such a manipulative word. So I almost said the word ”empowered”. And I don’t like that because it implies that people are scared or lack the courage to do things on their own.
But I feel like a lot of people are sitting there at these wirehouses or sitting there at these broker-dealer firms or just at bigger firms and looking to strike out and their biggest fear is, how am I going to eat? I have a wife and kids. We have a mortgage of $3,000 a month, and we want to put in a pool. Great, Sara. You’re telling me to go out there like a cowboy. Well, what’s my wife going to say when I can’t pay the pool man, right?
Some advisors haven’t actively marketed before, which is the case for lot of advisors, most advisors get their business through referrals. Nothing wrong with that. But when you have your own shop, you might not have the cache of the brand name behind you and you’re going to have to come up with something more creative.
Brad – I think I do this a lot in my business. I think advisors do this a lot. Sometimes what we all just need is a confidence-building exercise, right? I think that is a lot of what you’re bringing to this. There is a way to go about doing this. But maybe they want reassurance by hearing these stories of where it successfully happened. I think there’s a lot of value in that, not just the actual blocking and tackling, but the talking, hearing that this has happened.
And so where would you say most of your new kind of subscribers are in the timeline? Are these folks that are currently not doing this at all and they would like to and aspire to? Is it okay for them to show up and say Look, I don’t know anything about this, but apparently this is something I should be exploring.”?
Or are these folks already kind of in the third or fourth inning of the baseball analogy and you’re just kind of putting your foot on the gas for them? Or is it a mix of all of this?
Sara – I think they’re probably in the first or second inning. A lot of them have done a little bit of marketing, but nothing that’s too established and it probably hasn’t been too successful.
I think there’s very little marketing that a lot of them have actually done. Or they’ve done one of these like garbage, sorry if anyone offers these and is listening to this, one of these cookie-cutter, plug-and-play, I’ll send you some social media postings every month and that’s it. Like these garbage email newsletters that go out, or like robotic AI messaging on LinkedIn. Like they’ve done a lot, they’ve had a lot of the garbage products, a lot of them.
Brad – Yeah, it can be tough to grow in a market like we’re in and have been in for several years now and every year revenue keeps going up and income keeps going up and everything seems fine. And of course, we all know eventually markets go up, markets go down, markets go sideways. And I think as you’d attest to let’s say markets go sideways, not even down, let’s say they go sideways and all of a sudden your costs keep going up. You do need to find a way to market your practice, grow the practice.
Well, these are not overnight fixes, right? This is a long process to build a good marketing approach and to give it time to grow. And so if you wait till the market stops going up on its current trajectory to then look into this sort of thing, well, that’s better than not looking into it at all, but it’s not a quick fix. You really need to be addressing this even under good times. And I don’t know if you’d agree with that, but that’s usually my take on it.
Sara – I mean, I think when you make the decision to become an entrepreneur, you’re not an employee. And there is going to be some times when you’re just going to simply have to get out and paddle the boat. What I say is that marketing works best when it’s an extension of you and your personality. It works best when you’re building a community of clients and centers of influence who are like you or who at least you have some kind of a fundamental alignment of mission or mindset uncommon with.
I just don’t know why people do this any other way. It’s like no one would want to marry somebody that’s a polar opposite to them. I mean, I think it’s a little bit of I’ll just eat what I could kill. I’ll take anything. And maybe they are that way more when they’re beginning, but the best thing is if you could plan it out.
So if anybody’s sitting there at a firm and they are looking to leave and they’re thinking about it, but they don’t think they can do the marketing, what I would say is come to one of my meetups, first of all.
But second of all, there’s no reason that you can’t think through the marketing model right now and think about who really is it in the world that when I’m 70 years old, I want to look back and say, Bill has been my client for 25 years. I know his kids and his grandkids and everyone who works at his business. And what a wonderful gift this has been.
Collect gifts, collect jewels. These are not just accounts. These are human beings. You have to see it that way. When you see it that way, you just look at it that I’m an entrepreneur and I’m going to collect great people. Much like you and I, Brad, I’ve enjoyed being a professional contact of yours over the years. It’s a jewel. You can never have too many of these jewels.
I don’t know why everybody misses this. Like, I gotta get money out of them. I’ve never been like that. I’ve never been like “How many new clients am I going to get from going on the Brad Wales podcast?”. I’ve never been like that, I don’t know why.
You’ve got to understand that human interactions that are positive equal marketing. Here’s what I do every day. And I do it actually for my own psychological benefit, because in some ways, I have a kind of a crazy life. I have four kids. I have this business, okay. In some ways, this has like saved my life.
I try every day to have what I call Call Hour. And by the way, it’s not a full hour. A lot of times it’s just 20 minutes. I have it actually coming up at 3 PM Eastern time. I block off on my calendar if I can reasonably do it some time when I just call people and talk to them that I do business with.
So, it could be I call up this client that was on one of my programs a few years ago and I just say “You know what? I recall so fondly that we worked together and that you were on my meetups smiling. How are you doing? Are you still in need of any marketing or did you find what you were looking for elsewhere?” That’s marketing, all right.
Or I’ll call up that COI that I see checking my newsletter. And I’ll just say to this web developer, “Do you have any clients that have questions? Why don’t you send them over to me and I’ll answer them in my newsletter.” Caring, generous, logical. But do you know what it feels like to talk to people for 20 minutes a day with the agenda of just trying to understand where they are in their business? Nobody does this.
I mean, Brad, the person that sold you that picture behind you. Did that person ever call you up and say “ Hey, Brad, I really hope that picture is working out for you. Do you have any other art needs for your home? By the way, Brad, I see that you started a business since I sold you that painting. What’s your office like?” ”I don’t have an office; I might be looking for one.” “Really? Well, I know a great real estate broker. Maybe we could get you a discount. If not, here’s some blogs that he’s written about how to find an acceptable coworking space.”
Now I’m not just some vendor with their hand out. Now I’m actually someone who’s building a community of people who appreciate me and that I appreciate and that I enjoy. I’m building a chest of jewels. I’m building a beautiful structure, a beautiful castle where I can live. And I love this feeling because do you know what it’s like when 20 minutes a day you could just talk to people who kind of know you and respect you?
I mean, I wish I got this level of respect when I go out to the fruit stand, I don’t go to the guy to buy some tomatoes at the fruit stand and he’s like, “Get your money, get out of here.” You know what I’m saying? This is so fun. It validates me. It makes me feel valid as a business person. And then it makes me, and then guess what happens every so often?
Brad – You get a client out of it.
Sara – Do you know why? It’s because they just say “You know what, Sara? You were so right to call me right now. I’ve been reading your newsletter but I just never got around to talking to you though I really liked what you said about blah blah blah.“ Even if you don’t have a daily newsletter like this, just because you called sometimes people will consider doing business with you. I know it’s ridiculous.
But I know, and God have mercy on me, anything could happen, okay? Let us just pray to God for his mercy. But I know that if I were to keep doing this, I could always go broke. Anybody could go broke, but the chances are against me going broke because I’m a moving target. I’m not immobile. I’m relevant. I talk to people and I find out.
Okay, well, how do you get the leads? Well, we put them in our CRM. What CRM are you using? I’m using Advyzon. Do you like it? You know, I’m finding out these things and that just increases my net worth in terms of what I can offer, the knowledge I can offer. I don’t know why. I tell people, call people for 20 minutes a day and people are like, that’s ridiculous. What are you talking about?
Brad – Well, again, maybe they need to hear it or hear these stories and hear these examples. And I think everyone can tell Sara is genuine. You’re very passionate about these topics. This is not just some sales script. You’re trying to drum up business. And obviously, Sara’s very easy to talk to.
Actually, before we hit record on here, and I’ve known Sara for many, many years, but we get on and before I hit record, next thing you know we’re bantering. We had to stop each other because it’s like, okay, we actually should hit record and have this on the conversation because the next thing you know, we’re off and going and so I encourage everyone to have this conversation with Sara as well.
Explore her various offerings. Sara, to remind us again if you could go down the list, I’ll put it in the show notes as well, of the various websites. I know we highlighted Flat Fee Advisor Marketing but also the websites of the different offerings and the best way for people to get a hold of you.
Sara – I have like too many websites now. Saragrillo.com is where you could sign up for my daily newsletter. I’ve got to tell you, it really would warm my heart if you just sign up for the daily newsletter and if you could even just send me like a note and say you were listening to Brad’s podcast and blah, I’d love to hear from you, okay? And that website also has the bio about me. It has some blogs on there. There’s a lot of blogs on there that might be useful. And it talks about my services outside of the transparency stuff.
Now the transparency stuff is another ball game. If you just go to transparentfinancialadvisor.com, it links to the Flat Fee Advisor Marketing site, advice-only marketing site, the hourly financial advisor marketing site, it talks about our meetups.
You might not be able to convert to one of these business models, but I think you should just visit transparentfinancialadvisor.com to learn about what other people in the industry are doing because the competition is doing this. And you never know who in your network might be interested in being a flat-fee advisor. So maybe you could just pass it on to them and it would help that person.
Brad – Yes, I think when we look back there was a time everyone in this industry was a broker, a stockbroker, and he sold stocks for a commission and maybe eventually mutual funds. The industry evolved, so don’t think that the industry’s not going to continue to evolve, and we’re seeing this as one of the evolutions of that, of different ways to charge for services and package it up. Sara, great job being on the front end of that. We’ll put all the websites on the show notes.
Sara and I could sit here and I could keep chatting with you for another hour or two. I know you’re passionate about this stuff and I always learn something from it, but we’ll wrap it up because otherwise we won’t stop ourselves. Thank you very much for coming on.
Again, everyone, you got to check out the solutions. Sara’s a great person, very passionate about it. And if you haven’t noticed, this is an absolute straight shooter; she’s not going to beat around the bush. She’ll tell you exactly what she thinks you’re doing correct or not correct and see where it can go from there. So Sara, thank you for joining us.
Sara – Thanks for having me.
Brad – We’ll do it again some time.
Want To Learn More?
Schedule a Discovery call to begin the conversation about what an RIA path would look like for your practice.
