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Also available as podcast (Episode #109)
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What is the most exciting part about starting an RIA?
When transitioning your practice to the RIA model there are a LOT of steps involved. It starts with determining if the RIA model is even a fit for your practice. To then choosing which operating model to use. And finally, picking vendors and working through the logistics involved. These are all important and necessary steps, but they’re not necessarily always exciting/fun steps. There are however certain parts of the transition process that advisors and teams do get excited about.
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Want to learn even more by better understanding what a transition to the RIA model might look like for your own practice? I encourage you to schedule a Discovery call, and I’d be happy to begin that conversation with you.
Full Transcript:
What is the most exciting part about starting an RIA? That is today’s question on the Transition To RIA question and answer series. It is episode #109.
Hi, I’m Brad Wales with Transition to RIA, where I help you understand everything there is to know about why and how to transition your practice to the RIA model.
If you’re not already there, head to TransitionToRIA.com where you’ll find all the resources I make available from this entire series in video format, podcast format. I have articles, I have whitepapers. All kinds of things to help you better understand the model.
Again, TransitiontoRIA.com.
On today’s episode we’re going to talk about what is the most exciting, fun part of starting an RIA? This applies to whether you’re starting your own RIA or joining an RIA that’s of the 1099 variety, and you’ll see what I mean by that. But we’ll just refer to this as starting an RIA.
The reason I wanted to make an episode on this topic is because moving into the RIA model, making a transition, is a lot of work. I never underplay that. There’s a lot of work on the front end. Which is a lot of what I help advisors with is the education piece. How does the RIA model work? Does it make sense for your practice? What would it look like for your practice if you were to move into it?
There’s a lot of work that goes into the education piece, let alone if you decide it’s a good fit, putting all the pieces into place and all the planning that goes into it. It’s a lot of work. We’re talking many, many, many months of hard work. I never downplay that.
However, as I’ve talked about on many episodes, the benefits of having gone down that path far outweigh the temporary hard work that you will have to go through to get to the other side. To get to where you want to be with your practice.
Which by the way, if you don’t have my one-page checklist that identifies the main variables involved in transitioning your practice into the RIA model, go to TransitionToRIA.com, on the contact page. Reach out to me, I’d be happy to send it to you.
There are a lot of items that must be addressed through the process. A lot of them are what I call blocking and tackling steps. They are the not sexy parts of what needs to be done. They are those foundational pieces.
Picking an E&O provider for your firm, there’s nothing exciting about that. There’s nothing sexy about that. But it’s a necessary part of the steps involved. Again, I help advisors identify the steps, and how to solve for them. But there’s a lot of things like that.
It’s like buying a new home. When you walk into your new home, you want to automatically start thinking about how to decorate it, where you’ll hang out, this is where we’ll put the TV.
But there are a lot of blocking and tackling things you might need to do. There might be light switches or lights that are broken that you need to fix. Those are the necessary blocking and tackling steps, but they’re not necessarily fun.
The question is, what’s the equivalent fun steps, exciting steps of transitioning your practice into the RIA model? That’s what we’re going to be talk about here. I’ll give you a couple examples.
Where advisors start to get excited, I can see it on them, they’re excited to share and talk about it with me, is where you’re starting to build the brand you’ll have with the new practice.
The first part of that is picking the name of your firm.
This is about to be your company. If you’ve been with a W2 firm your entire life, you’ve been an employee your entire life, suddenly, wow, this is about to be your firm, your baby. It is very exciting to start thinking about these things.
What do I want to call myself? What’s that brand going to be? How am I going to put the brand out there?
Now yes, some of you that have been in a W2 model have maybe been allowed to use kind of a quasi brand. You might be the Smith Group of XYZ Brokerage firm. But there is always that byline in there. You can’t brand it however you want.
For the first time for many advisors, that are moving into the RIA model, this is their first chance to have their own name, their own brand.
That’s the first exciting part. What do you want to call yourself? What’s the brand? You get to visualize it.
Often next up in the process if getting a logo.
As a sidebar, and I have no skin in this game, a lot of advisors use logobids.com for a logo. There are different websites you can use, but that is one of them. You essentially fill out a questionnaire, say what you’re after, and then all kinds of folks will create logos that you get to pick from.
That’s an exciting thing because this idea you’ve had in your head is starting to visually come alive. What your logo will look like. It might seem like a trivial thing, but that’s what’s going to be on your signage, your website, your business card.
When advisors start getting a logo they often proactively share them with me. They’ll say (during a zoom)…. “can I bring this up on my screen? I want to show you what I narrowed it down to. Here’s the one I like the best. Here’s what my family likes. They think this one’s better, this color scheme.”
You can see the excitement. It just starts to bring it alive with that visual. So again, after you pick a name, now you’re starting to build the brand. You’re creating a logo. That’s what gets exciting.
Then once you have a logo, the next big step in the process, and it’s just one of the items that you’re working through concurrently to move towards the transition, is you’re going to need a website.
Now, don’t worry about how do I create a website? That’s what I help advisors with, it’s one of the pieces on the checklist.
As for how to create a website, there are several wonderful industry specific vendors that can help you with that. They come in different service levels, pricing packages, and all those sorts of things.
A website takes the name and logo one step even further because now you’re seeing your message, this idea that maybe you’ve had in your mind for years of…. “Wow, if I were to start my own firm, this is how it would look. These are the services we would offer. This is how I want to message it to my community. A website is what starts to bring that alive.
It’s fun to see advisors as they work with a website design company and they get the first draft back. They’ll often share it with me. They want to share their screen (on a zoom) to show it to me. You can see the excitement, because again, their vision is coming alive.
You’ve maybe thought for a long time about, this is how I would do it if I was independent, and now you are starting to do it. And while the website won’t go fully live until your actual launch date, but wow, it is now becoming real. This is what I am going to be putting out there to the public. That is very exciting to be able to share and to see.
It still takes a lot of work to make a website. There’s a lot of back and forth with the designer, the copywriting, maybe you need professional photos of you and your team, etc. So, it’s not to say that this is not still work, but this is the fun work. This is the exciting work.
Put the blocking and tackling aside for a moment. This is where it starts to come alive. The website’s a very exciting part, a very fun part of moving towards transitioning to your own RIA.
Next, another example where advisors get excited about is when you start building out the office.
Now, some of that is blocking and tackling. Determining whether you are going to own an office – I did a recent episode on that you might want to check out – or are you going to lease an office?
Where’s the location going to be? You might need to negotiate a lease. Do you need to do build out? That is a lot of work and some of it is less glamorous than other parts.
But once you have an office picked out, and you’ve figured out where the walls are going to go, or you get the internet hooked up – again, not all of that is super exciting – but that’s where the brand, the name starts to creep back into it.
Again, I see advisors share this stuff with me. Your signage, or you at least have a visual draft of it, that you’ll be hanging outside of your office. You can start to visualize it. Or, there’s a glass door at the entrance to the office and your logo has now been etched into the glass.
Or maybe when your clients walk in the first thing they come across is a reception desk and one of your team members might sit there. Behind that team member is a beautiful sign with your logo and your name on it.
I’ve had plenty of advisors that will send me – completely unsolicited on my part – pictures of this. They are so excited, so proud. When the new sign goes up, they have someone take a picture of them in front of it, because it’s their business, their baby, coming to life.
That’s fun for me to be part of. It’s exciting to see people becoming entrepreneurs. For those of you that have never had a company before, you’ve maybe always wanted to have your own business and here it is, literally, physically coming to life. That’s a very exciting part of this process.
The final example I’ll give regarding the exciting parts of starting a firm, and you can’t get ahead of yourself on this one, but as all of this starts to come into place, and it’s a reminder of the new found freedom and flexibility you now have, that you likely haven’t had previously, particularly if you’ve been at a W2 wirehouse type firm your whole career, all of a sudden the wheels start turning in your head about what new business development techniques you could now start doing.
It’s not that you haven’t perhaps thought of some of these things prior, but it will really start to come alive.
Maybe as you’re building out an office, and you realize you can do whatever you want with it….if you have an extra spare office, you might think, I want to have a podcast. I could do the podcast recordings back here and make a little mini studio for it.
Or maybe you like the idea, as I do, of making videos. And you start getting excited about that.
I don’t want to say you can do whatever you want, because there are some general industry rules you can’t violate. You can’t, for example, make guarantees to clients and stuff like that.
So I’ll hedge it by saying you can’t necessarily do everything imaginable. But on a creative front, you generally can do most of what you come up with. This is where those ideas really starts to come alive.
Once you physically see the logo, the website, the office, you start thinking about what you want from a business development standpoint. What have you seen other advisors do? Whether it’s a podcast, or they have signage, or they’re doing videos, or writing articles, or whitepapers, suddenly you can start thinking about all the things you want to do now as well.
It’s ok to start getting excited about this stuff now, even if you’re very early in the process. If you were to make the transition, what are some of the things you’d want to implement? But again, the key is having patience because there are a lot of steps involved to work through first.
However, if you have, for instance, a podcast now, somehow you’re able to pull that off at your current firm, whatever their constraints are….yes, it’ll be important to make sure you’re continuing with that (throughout the transition.)
But for many of you, you haven’t been able to do any of these things prior, and it’s all going to be new. The key is to have patience.
It’s a matter of….let me let me do all the legwork, the planning, the blocking and tackling, you must rally your team, etc. It’s going to be a lot of work.
Then once you’re through all that, and you’ve caught your breath, and you’ve figured your new world out, then by all means get started on all the great ideas you have from a marketing perspective, business development perspective, you can start doing them.
In theory, you could do them right from the jump. I caution people though, have patience. It is okay to start getting excited though about it, there’s nothing wrong with starting to have a vision for it.
So, that’s a few examples of where I see advisors most excited about the transition process. And you deserve to have a little of that because you are doing so many other things that are not as fun.
Two takeaways I’ll leave you with.
First, for those of you that have never had a business, started a business, become an entrepreneur, it is a special feeling when this all starts to click, when it starts to come alive. This is going to be your business, your baby.
I know this firsthand. I worked in a W2 corporate world for almost 20 years before starting my own business. There is something special about it. There is a special feeling about it.
You will gladly put in way more hours working for your own business, your own baby, than you ever will for someone else. And once you’ve tasted that, it drives you, it excites you. So know that feeling is coming. That’s part of the reward for going through all this.
Now that said, there’s a lot of work involved in making all this successful. I never wear rose-colored glasses and oversell something. But one of the big benefits of being able to go on your own is to be that business owner, be that entrepreneur. It’s very exciting for you the advisor. And it’s exciting for me to observe and help advisors become entrepreneurs.
And then the final point I’ll make, I don’t want to belabor this point because I’ve already mentioned it quite a bit, is even with all this fun stuff, you still need to do the blocking and tackling.
You need to know what those items are, you need to work through them, you need to prioritize and know what order to tackle them in to get you from the original idea phase all the way to the other side of the mountain.
That’s something I’m happy to help you with. That’s a typical part of what I help advisors with. I’m happy to discuss that with you as well.
First things first, head to TransitionToRIA.com where you’ll find all the resources I provide to help you better understand the model. This entire series is available in video format, podcast format. I have articles, I have whitepapers.
At the top of every page is a Contact link. Click on that and you can instantly and easily schedule time to have a one-on-one conversation with me, whether you want to talk about any of today’s fun, exciting topics, or the blocking and tackling, or all of it. I’m happy to have that conversation with you as well.
Again, TransitionToRIA.com.
With that, I hope you found value on today’s episode and I’ll see you on the next one.
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