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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:
Village Financial Services
Vendor category:
Virtual Operations Support
Episode host:
Brad Wales
Episode guest:
Olivia Allen
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 take a look at the solution providers powering the RIA model. On today’s episode, we’re answering the question, “What is Village Financial Services?” And to help us with that is the founder of Village Financial Services, Olivia Allen. Olivia, thanks for coming on.
Olivia Allen – Thanks so much for having me, Brad.
Brad – I’m particularly excited about this conversation for a couple reasons. One, as I’ve gotten to know Olivia, I think it’s a great service, so I look forward to that part of the conversation. But for any of you that have consumed any of my content over time or have just taken a look at my business, I’m a big believer in having a focused niche business and being the very best at that one particular thing. Obviously, my business transitioned to RIA. It’s a very niche business.
But as a practice, as an advisor, as a team, particularly if you go in the RIA space, the good news is there’s a lot of solution providers out there you can lean on. I am a big believer that when available, you should be leaning on industry-specific providers, not just some random person down the street that’s trying to service 10 different industries, because every industry has its nuances.
As Olivia is about to explain to us, not only is she focused on one particular area of the service she provides, she unapologetically narrows it even further from there. I think it is just a wonderful way to align the business and where that doesn’t align with a potential advisor team, that’s fine, but where it does, it can be a very good thing. So know that I’m a big believer in that niche focus.
And with that kind of preamble, I didn’t want to steal your thunder, Olivia, of the exact service, but if you could give us that high level overview of what exactly Village Financial Services is.
Olivia – Sure. So Village Financial Services, the big niche here, exists for RIAs, particularly ones that custody at Schwab or Altruist or will custody at Schwab or Altruist. So we have three main service lines. The first is going to be transition services, moving advisors to independence or between custodians. So maybe they’re at an LPL and SEI and moving over to Schwab or Schwab to Altruist, really just owning that transition work for the firm both at the custodian and also with their tech.
The second piece is ops consulting, working with them to say, hey, we have this practice now. How do we operate it? What does our new client onboarding look like? What do review meeting processes look like? How do we actually create a system around this thing?
And then we are with our transition teams forevermore through fractional CSA work. So this is like a remote admin that you can have for just a certain number of hours each month. And they really can work in every part of your practice except for trading. We don’t trade. So those services can kind of come in pieces or all together. But those are the three main ways that we serve RIAs.
Brad – Let’s dive into those. So one of the big benefits of why advisors go into the RIA model is, there’s all kinds of motivations, but oftentimes it’s more independence, more flexibility with the things they can do with their practice. But that also generally comes with more responsibility.
So for better or worse, if you’ve been at a wirehouse firm your whole career, oftentimes you are assigned some sort of CSA support person and it’s determined who all you need to share that person with perhaps. It, for better or worse, is provided for you, take it or leave it, and they do certain things and whatnot. When you go on a more independent path, the wonderful thing is you get to decide perhaps who your team members are, the type of services you’re going to provide for your clients, but you need to be able to support that somehow. And so that’s where, okay, how are you going to solve for that? I think the Village Financial Services package is wonderful in helping with those things.
But let’s maybe take them one at a time. So on the transition process, and that’s obviously a large part of my audience, for advisors that are considering making a move, let’s say you’ve done all that legwork, you’ve done all that homework, talked to someone like me, and this is a path you should be pursuing. Well, there’s a lot that goes into that, but literally the most important part is that final step which is actually going through the trenches and making the transition and moving your client accounts and whatnot. So could you kind of expand on where you help with that?
Olivia – Sure, yep. So depending on the type of transition it is, there’s like a data portability question, right, and like gathering data. So we’re helping in whatever ways we can get our hands on the data ahead of time, we’re doing it. Sometimes that doesn’t exist. So we’re helping advisors come up with “Okay, what is the strategy? What is the game plan of when I contact the client or not, depending on your non-solicit? What is the process, right? Who is contacting and for what different types of information? So coming up with that workflow.
It’s then obviously executing on the workflow. So we are prepping all of the paperwork. If Schwab or Altruist is prepping the envelopes, that’s great. They both have wonderful transition teams embedded within the custodian already, but they are not client-facing. So we are actually communicating with the clients. We are holding their hand every step of the way through the process until the assets come over.
We can stop there, but usually we don’t stop there because the other piece of a transition is okay, now we have all of this tech, especially with your example of like a wirehouse. You’re learning an all-new custodian, all new tech that you’ve selected, maybe with the help of you or another type of consultant. We also have those conversations.
But now we need to get all of our households into this tech. We need to build out the CRM. We need to build out our file structure. We need to get our households into our new planning tool. If we’re getting tax returns. All of these things need to be built out. So those are additional services that we can offer because we are fractional CSAs first. So we are working with firms in the fractional CSA side of our business in those platforms every single day, right? So our big differentiator when it comes to like transition consulting and execution is that we’re not just doing the custodian work and bringing the assets over, which is huge. But now it’s like, okay, now we have this money, what are we doing with it? So we work really comprehensively with firms to move them into their new independent RIA.
Brad – I think you kind of hit it on the head with the focus, right, which I applauded you for at the beginning with the Schwab and Altruist focus. Teams making this move oftentimes might be bringing some of their team members with them, and there’s some nuances to that that you just want to be mindful of to navigate successfully.
But let’s say you are going to bring a team member, and whether that’s you’re leaving a wirehouse or maybe an independent broker-dealer, even if you have a very talented team member or maybe multiple people, unless they’ve ever been in a firm that has used Schwab or Altruist and some of these tech solutions, this is all going to be new to them.
I think that’s just a great example how you’re not new to this. You and your team are not new to these resources. Literally from the very moment you begin the engagement, you’re already up to speed on how it all works. I think that’s a big plus. Obviously your focus on just particular solution providers enables you to spend your time staying on top of all the nuances with them.
So for those that make that move and you help them is that second layer, that ops consultant, usually something that follows that “Hey, okay, now we’ve we’ve made it through the trenches, we’ve caught our breath. Now we have a little chance to kind of refine things.” Is that where you’re coming in and kind of helping from that office consultant or when does that typically come?
Olivia – Absolutely. Yeah. So it’s usually then if we’re thinking about ops consulting and sometimes we’re even layering in FCSA, so this fractional CSA work at the same time. So it’s like great, we’ve caught our breath, we’re here, even if you have in-house staff to your point, Brad.
Now we’re all learning all of these new tools. The in-house staff is also focused on just maintaining the client relationships, right? But somebody still needs to execute. If the Smiths just finally got their estate planning paperwork done during this transition period and we need to retitle the joint account into a trust, somebody’s gotta do that. And your in-house CSA just might not be familiar with how to do that right now. So the fractional CSA helps a lot there too.
But on the ops consulting side of things, it’s okay, great, we’re here now. What is the XYZ financial review meeting process? What do we do with our clients now that we’re in this independent space? So I’m able to sit with firms and have them brain dump on me on what their dream service calendar is, what does that look like, and then help them frame that into their CRM.
So like actually let’s take this and build a process out of it so it becomes repeatable for the in-house team to use or with their fractional CSA. New clients that are onboarding, okay, how we onboarded them at the wirehouse is likely night and day different than how that will happen in their new RIA. So what does that process look like walking them through that?
So we have suites of our own best practice templates mapped to kind of the big four CRMs in the RIA world. Then we take those and adjust them based on what the firm’s vision is. So servicing processes, things like beneficiary updates, address updates, email changes. Those are pretty specific to the custodian, maybe also a little bit of the CRM, depending on what the servicing need is. So we’ll tweak descriptions.
But those relationship-based processes are really where we spend the time. It’s like what is new client onboarding going to look like, what are review meetings going to look like. It’s making sure that there’s detailed descriptions so if there are in-house staff, because of our expertise in Schwab and Altruist, we’re able to kind of create a roadmap or a maybe a little bit of like a training guide.
This guide will tell them okay, if we’re doing a beneficiary update, this is where you go for the digital workflow, this is the information you’re gonna need, or this is the type of form that you need to execute X, Y, or Z. This really helps set that infrastructure and set them off for success, whether they’re using our fractional CSA service or not.
Brad – I assume you would agree with this where the longer I’ve run my business, the bigger part of my value is just from all the conversations I’ve had, the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of conversations I’ve had with advisors and teams. So when I’m having a new type conversation and someone gives me some particular scenario or example, I can often say, yes, I’ve talked to other folks that were in that situation and here’s how they approached it, or here’s how they solved it. And there’s a lot of value in that.
That’s just literally because in my case, I’ve gone through the reps of having all those conversations. I assume you would agree, and I welcome your comments, that there’s a lot to gain from all the conversations that you and your team have with all these different practices. When someone does come with that scenario that they want to improve things or they don’t even know where to start on how to improve something, not only are you using your own experience, you can point to other scenarios that you have come across and how those advisors and teams ultimately handled it.
Olivia – Definitely. So as our name implies, we firmly believe that it takes a village. I have six years now of experience in all these different areas but I’m also backed by my team of FCSAs that work with their own firms that are gathering their own information. So we have our own like internal wiki database that’s just full of information.
If it’s maybe something that me as the lead consultant has not seen before, somebody on the team probably has. So we’re drawing from all of our team of 13’s collective experiences to better serve RIAs no matter where they’re at in their process.
Brad – And that snowball just continues to grow bigger in value with every engagement.
Let’s pivot down to the third pillar of your service model, and you’ve kind of alluded to it. Maybe just for the cleanest example, because there could be scenarios where someone, as part of the transition, is signing up for that and you’re going right into it. But maybe just an easier example is that already-established RIA, whether it’s six months after a transition, twelve months or 10 years after it, that is realizing they maybe need this sort of help. So two things that I’d love to hear from you. One, again, what is that fractional CSA model? What are the type of things that you’re actually doing for folks?
And then two, where are you typically seeing this need arise? Is this because a firm has lost a team member and as opposed to trying to find another skilled person to replace them, it’s just easier to lean on you? Or is this because it’s just better to lean on you and your team as experts from regardless?
I’ll remind you of the two, but if you could start maybe again with what is, for those that aren’t intimately familiar, fractional CSA? Maybe just give us some specific examples of literally the types of things you’re doing in that role.
Olivia – Mm-hmm. Sure. So fractional CSA is a remote, part-time team member. As far as from a client-facing perspective, that’s what your fractional CSA is. We work on a one-to-one basis. So we have one CSA that’s assigned to your firm and it is a client-facing role.
So we’re doing everything from scheduling to rollover phone calls when we need to call net benefits to initiate the rollover process. We’re hopping on Zoom with Mr. Smith because he can’t get into Schwab Alliance and he needs support. We’re doing all account servicing so everything at the custodian except for trading is fair game for us. So we will work really across the board in any account openings or updates, additions that we need inside of any client account.
Beyond that, it looks like we are not paraplanners, right? I call it data migration. So we will take data from point A and put it in point B. So we’re onboarding a new client, we’re gathering all these statements, we’re filing the statements, and then we are putting placeholders into Right Capital for that household and then all of their accounts that we’ve gathered, all the information we’ve gathered for them from their statements.
Taking it a step further, we also have, unique to Village, our CSA service calendar. So it’s all of the project-based work that goes on. I look at it like the duck that’s floating on top of the water is like the advisor and the client service calendar, and then the feet underneath it is the CSA service calendar. So think like RMD monitoring or beneficiary reviews, pulling at a firm level all of each household’s beneficiaries, CRM scrub, contribution monitoring, all these little things. CRM audit, like mock audits, all of these project-based things that we also are doing for all of our firms. So does that help kind of with the overview?
Brad – Yeah, I think having just specific examples of where someone’s leaning on you is helpful. And then the second part of that is where are you finding most of your RIA clients signing up again? Is it because they’ve lost a team member or they just feel this is a more scaled way to grow or where is the sweet spot usually?
Olivia – Yeah, so for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll look at kind of like three client avatars. So there’s the solo lifestyle practice where it’s just the advisor wanting to serve as many households as he or she possibly can and kind of just call it from there. So they need somebody to come in and help support some of that administrative role since they’re wearing all of the hats so that they can serve as many households as possible, just staying small and lean.
Then there’s the solos that are looking to scale and those solos that have ambition of maybe bringing on an additional advisor or an associate one day or maybe even hiring a full-time CSA. They’re looking for, yes, all that great account servicing, but also that ops consulting piece of like, okay, let’s build the foundation of the practice that I can scale upon so we can help with that piece.
Then there’s the, to your point, we’ve transitioned or maybe we’ve lost someone. Then we have larger firms that are either A) have just transitioned and so their focus is on their existing client book and trying to make sure that they’re maintaining those relationships. We’re able to take a lot of the weight of the account servicing off of their plate so they can focus on just staying in front of clients.
The other side of that is when we have larger RIAs, particularly ones that are going through acquisition. Those are like mini transitions, right? So we’re bringing on new advisors with their entire book, helping them in the interest of maintaining both capacity in actual time but also the sanity of the existing CSA staff not having to also work that mini transition that comes as a result of the acquisition. We have a handful of firms that utilize our CSA services in that way just to get over that kind of hump of having a mass influx of clients.
Brad – Yeah, that’s a great point because the existing team still has to carry on with their proverbial day job but then all of a sudden there’s this new transition event happening on top of it. I think it’s a great example.
And I’m a fan of solutions where if you, as the advisor team, do things solely in-house. So for today’s episode we’re talking about, you know, client service-type tasks, and let’s say you have one member, two members, or maybe it’s larger than that. But those employees, no matter how great they are, no matter how dedicated they are, no matter how knowledgeable they are, well, they want to take vacation at times and they’re gonna get sick at times.
And unfortunately it is what it is. You are going to have turnover at times. And particularly if you only have say one or two members and you lose that one or two members for either a short period of time or a long period of time, that can be very disruptive.
Whereas, not to put it on you, Olivia, but as I say, if you were to use someone like Village Financial Services, that’s Olivia’s problem to make sure that her team has the depth to not miss a beat on the day-to-day basis. So it certainly benefits you to outsource in that regard.
For folks that this has kind of resonated with, and again, we’ve got a couple different pillars here, a couple different service models. Maybe for this question, we’ll take that advisor that is, because it’s a large part of my audience, that’d be making a transition and sees the value of having your team help go through the trenches. What does that conversation look like?
And we’ll finish up with how folks can reach out and engage the conversation. But for folks that reach out that are saying, hey, I’m three months out, six months out, whatever the case is, and I saw that episode you did with Brad perhaps, and hey, this might be something that would be helpful for us. Just to set expectations, what does that first conversation consist of? And then ideally, again, for that transition service, how far in advance do you typically like to have that first conversation?
Olivia – Sure. So what it looks like is a confidential intro call where we’re just hashing out the details, helping me understand what type of transition this is going to be, what your tech stack is now versus what it will be, if you even know. Sometimes that’s part of the conversation too. As far as timing, it’s the earlier the better, right? We want to be engaged with all of our firms at least a month from the day, whatever the day may be. But the sooner the better just so that we can kind of plot our path forward and get you on our calendars because these transition blocks, they take a lot of time and effort, and depending on how many households you have to serve, we want to be able to slate you in accordingly.
So the conversation is pretty, not open-ended, but we cover a lot of ground. We just want an understanding of what your vision is, what’s already been decided, and where we might be able to help where there’s still some gaps. So that’s kind of where we start and then we go from there with me kind of quoting it and understanding, giving you the advisor an understanding of potentially where we could support your path forward.
Brad – I say it’s never too early, but I would concur with your reference to that, because there’s a lot of details that go into this, and ideally in a transition you’re never rushing any of the process. So the earlier you begin at least that exploration call, the more time there is to perhaps work through things with Olivia and okay, well here’s all the steps and here’s the way we want to do things and and here’s who does what. So it certainly doesn’t hurt to start sooner rather than later.
For advisors that this is resonating with, you know, hey, this all sounds great and wow, I can outsource stuff and wow there’s these experts and they’re gonna help me do all this stuff. Well of course everything comes at a cost, right? This is kind of a tough question because you do have these multiple service models, so feel free to kind of keep it high level as a starting point, but just to kind of set expectations, how do you typically figure out how to price out these various services?
Olivia – Sure. So for transitions, we look at the type of transition. So data portability and whether or not we are touching data as part of it and manipulating data versus maybe it’s just paperwork only or is it client-facing? So there’s a bunch of considerations in those types.
Then there’s the additional premium services. So when we’re thinking about building out CRMs and planning tools and billing and maybe integrations and automations, all of those have a kind of separate menu with add-ons. So we quote it pretty much to the firm, just depending on what their needs are and what would be most helpful to them.
With ops consulting, similarly, there’s a menu. So some firms decide to just kind of chunk things out and only focus on new client onboarding right now, or maybe in the the case of a transition, it’s yeah, we’d really like you to help us set up our custodian feed, our billing, and let’s get that new client onboarding dialed in. So it can be modular, and all this information is available on our website, just the different options that are available.
Then with FCSA it’s a set monthly retainer so there’s a minimum number of hours that you have to commit to but you can tell me any number above that at our standard hourly rate so that will be billed in arrears, always. It would be an administrative nightmare for me to do it in advance and then try to reconcile. But it is that guarantee, that commitment, so that we’re able to guarantee capacity for the number of hours that you need us to serve. So that’s kind of how the billing works in all three arenas.
Brad – Okay. I applaud you, I know a lot of this information is on the website from a pricing perspective, as well as some of the information that Olivia’s shared with me prior. We were talking about this before I hit record. One thing I’m very impressed by is she has an expectations document. I’m sorry, I’ve probably not given it the fully proper name, but the idea being it’s just very clearly defined from an expectation standpoint. Here’s what they do and here’s what they don’t do. I think that’s just for the better because if someone is seeking out some type of service and that’s not part of your service model, there’s no reason to try and begin an engagement that’s not going to be a fit.
And likewise, I also applaud you again for staying in your lane and saying, hey, here’s what we do, here’s what we’re good at, and we don’t go outside of that. So there’s a lot of transparency with what Olivia’s shared with me prior. So for what it’s worth, good job on that front. I think that’s quite helpful.
Olivia – Thank you so much. And yep, it’s our expectations of engagement document, and you can find that on our website on the Fractional CSA page.
Brad – So speaking of the website, to wrap up for folks that do want to learn more, what is the best way to contact you? I assume it’s go to the website, so if you could kind of share that with us. And then for folks that do want to have a one-on-one conversation, how do they go about doing that?
Olivia – Sure. So our website is just www.villagefs (like financial services) dot com. I’m also very active on LinkedIn, so please shoot me a note there. Always happy to answer one-off questions or send you the appropriate booking link.
You can find, in the interest of transparency, we have intro questionnaires for each of our service lines to help us understand if we’re a good fit and help you understand that as well ahead of time. So there’s a contact us page where all those questionnaires live. So at the end of the questionnaire, if we’re a good fit to work together, you’ll be able to schedule time immediately following completion of the questionnaire.
Brad – Perfect. So VillageFS (for financial services), villagefs.com and on LinkedIn. I think Olivia, that’s where you and I first connected. So certainly she’s very active on there. And we’ll also put that in the show notes. But Olivia, I really appreciate you coming on and helping us better understand what is Village Financial Services.
Olivia – Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Brad.
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