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Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild and on this week’s show, Steve and I speak with Michael Kitces. If you’re not familiar with Michael, you may be alone because he has earned an extraordinary following in this industry. Now, Michael is someone I would describe as intensely curious and that drives his passion for learning, which, it turns out, is a huge benefit for the industry. Michael is the Director of Wealth Management and a Partner with Pinnacle Advisory Group. In his spare time, he writes the Kitces Report, an advanced educational newsletter for financial planners and attracts 200,000 unique visitors or more, every month to his blog, The Nerd’s Eye View. He’s one of the most active people I know in this industry, and it’s probably worth pointing out that he holds eight degrees or designations.

In this episode, we focus in on where referrals fit into to the overall marketing strategy for advisors and we go deep on leveraging thought leadership and content as one of the most effective tactics to drive growth. Let’s face it, Michael knows a thing or two about how to make that work. With that, let’s get on with the interview.

Michael, it’s such a pleasure to have you today. Welcome to the show.

Michael Kitces:
Thank you, I’m excited to be here. Love talking about all thing referrals and referability, so I’m looking forward to the conversation today.

Steve Wershing:
Awesome.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s a good entrée, because I was going to say, you write about a lot of different topics, right? I don’t know if you always remember what you write, but I’m going to take you a few years back in your blog. You’ve talked about referrals a few times and —

Michael Kitces:
Hopefully nothing I’m going to regret too much here.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, that’s right, yeah. Do you remember when you said. . .

Michael Kitces:
This is going to be the greatest hits up there.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s right, there you go. But I did read a post going back a few years and I thought it was quite a lively post, in that you were taking a shot at something that was just traditional wisdom. You essentially said, is referral marketing really a best practice? More specifically, you said, “Look, the truth when you look at the data is that growing a practice by referrals is simply all that’s left over for most advisors when they don’t otherwise have marketing strategy at all.” You’ve talked about that theme a couple of times in a couple of different ways. I’d love to know, just to kick us off, today where do you see the importance of referrals in that overall marketing mix for advisors?

Michael Kitces:
I have to come at this from a couple of directions. I think the first distinction I make, is there’s a huge difference between passive referrals and active referrals. Passive referrals, frankly, is a domain that most of us live in as financial advisors. It’s sort of the fundamental wisdom and approach, serve your clients well and they’ll like you and they’ll talk about you to their friends and then you’ll get more clients, and we grow our businesses through inbound passive referrals by just trying to serve our clients. I distinguish that from what I’d call active referrals, which is having some kind of proactive strategy about how that’s actually supposed to happen beyond just saying, hey I’m going to serve my clients well and hope that they refer me. Whether that’s- you do a very outbound referral networking approach or you ask every client for referrals or, just you have a combined marketing strategy that’s meant to drive a volume of inbound referrals to your niche or expertise.

It’s the passive referrals that seems to still be the dominant mode in the industry and is the one that I take most issue with. That so many studies, we still see one study after another, the data comes out and says the most common way that advisors generate new business is through referrals and then you go deeper into some of the industry benchmarking studies and the data’s been really stable for years. The typical advisory firm spends one to one and a half percent of its revenues on marketing. Most firms that I know that even spend a little bit on marketing, their primary marketing event is really just a client appreciation event where you bring in existing clients and you hope that they extra, extra love you to give you some referrals.

Basically, most firms do no actual marketing in any way, shape or form. So, there is no possible way that any client could ever find them to do business with them, unless they happened to get referred. Then, the conclusion is, well the overwhelming majority of advisors generate all of their business from referrals. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a best practice, that just means when you deliberately, proactively refuse to do any other kind of marketing, of course all of your clients are going to come from referrals, that’s the only thing that’s left. But the problem is, it might not actually be much growth. Now, that’s what we’re starting to see showing up in the latest benchmarking studies over the past year. We’ve seen two different benchmarking studies that have come out in the past twelve months that are now showing referrals are no longer the top source of new business generation for advisors. That outbound marketing and business development, is actually overtaking it now. With the caveat that that seems to be a small subset of firms that are getting really good at marketing and winning the lion’s share of the business, while the majority of advisors, by quantity, are still in the same realm of, I’m just going to serve my clients really well and hope that they like me and send me a referral. But, that strategy is working less and less and less now.

Julie Littlechild:
So, Michael, then do you think that the problem is that we aren’t good enough at getting referrals or that other forms of new business are just taking over?

Michael Kitces:
I think it’s really some of each. I think that honestly the biggest culprit is just most of us are not really good at doing referrals. We don’t like asking for referrals, it feels awkward, so we just sort of rely on them passively and have this mentality that the more I just try to service my clients, great, the more they’ll refer me. For a lot of advisors that’s worked in the past, in part because in the past, most clients didn’t already have an advisor. Or, if they had one it was someone that was really just selling them a product and people figured that out pretty quickly. So, they were looking and said, hey do you know anyone, and the referral happened.

Now, increasingly we’re in an environment where:  A. More and more clients are already attached to someone. I mean, even if they’re in a “self-directed” brokerage channel now. Schwab’s got CFPs in their branches, Fidelity’s got CFPs in their branches, Vanguard’s got a CFP service. Even the unattached, self-directed client has a lot more access to advisors than they did in the past. If the client wants to go and actually search, even if they want to search for a referral, it rarely happens on a standalone basis now. Now, searching for a referral might be, I asked three of my friends for three referrals, I get the referrals and then I go online and I look up the advisors and I try to decide which one I actually want to follow up with and call.

Now, all of a sudden, even the referral doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens in the context of the rest of your marketing. I think that the distinction now that we’re starting to see is that referral efforts that don’t actually have solid marketing backing them up, start to break down. And, the reverse begins to happen as well, which is, when you actually have built strong marketing for yourself, all of a sudden, the referrals are actually less necessary in the first place because good marketing actually pays lots of dividends beyond just making sure that people that get referred to you actually follow through and call you. That’s part of the split that I think we’re seeing.

Steve Wershing:
I’d also just like to clarify something in here because I believe that you believe this, but I’m not sure that some of the audience necessarily does. I think for some people it’s either you’re asking for referrals or you’re not. That’s the yin and yang of referral marketing, when in reality, referral marketing is a lot of different things. You can be very active in your marketing plan without actually asking for referrals. I’m not sure that a lot of advisors get that. What do you think?

Michael Kitces:
Yeah, I even look at it in the context of our own business and my platform. I generate a regular flow of referrals. I’ve actually built most of my businesses entirely through inbound referrals because I hate with a capital “H” ever asking anyone for a referral, it feels horrifically awkward to me. I don’t like doing it and I don’t like being on the receiving end of it, so I won’t do it for people. Yet, I basically generate all of my new business from inbound referrals, but I generate inbound referrals because I have an entire platform that I’ve built to demonstrate that I have expertise. So that most people who find me, the inquiry I get is mostly always the same template: “Found your article online because my friend Joe sent it to me. Read it. Thought it was really interesting. Signed up for your list. Been getting your stuff for a while. Now I have a problem and I need some help and I’d like to work with you.” So, I would still call that a referral. That introduction, that chain, that sequence of events started with, “My friend Joe sent me an article that you wrote” which is a referral, like, hey, you should check out Kitces, he makes some good stuff. But, I didn’t ask for that referral, I didn’t go out and solicit that referral, I brought that referral in by creating a platform that helps me to market in many different ways.

One of which is, it drives a lot of inbound referrals. I focus particularly in my writing for consumers on advanced retirement and tax strategies and we work with people transitioning into retirement with about half a million, up to five million dollars. So, I’ve got a really clear vision of who our advisory firm works with. Who I am writing for. Who I am trying to create content to demonstrate my expertise for and show them helpful things. Because I know eventually what happens, some of them say, “Gee, this all sounds cool, but I need some help with this” and we can say, “Well, we do that. We’d be happy to work with you.” All of it is built around referrals, but not an “ask for referrals” it’s a “earn the referral, be referable, generate the referrals that come into you” with something more than just, I just want to service my clients so well that they’ll take it upon themselves to tell all their friends.

Julie Littlechild:
It sounds like, and maybe this is too nuanced, but initially, if you follow that example you gave, the referral was provided because there was content that was interesting. So, I provided a referral to Steve and I sent him an article that you wrote. I was really not necessarily saying, “You’ve got to talk to Michael” I was saying, “I just think this information is interesting.” I was trying to solve that problem first and foremost, is that fair?

Michael Kitces:
Yeah. The referrals I get aren’t, hey, you should talk to Michael. It’s, hey, here’s a thing that Michael created that would be helpful to you, which the person just does because they want to be helpful to their friend. But, lo and behold, effectively that means that they just referred me as an introduction to their friend and now their friend is going to start following and reading what I do. And, when I multiply that to an endless number of introductions, because, of course, you write it once, lots of people can read that and share that, I don’t even have to ask for or solicit every referral. Just the multiplier effect when you do that systematically over time, as with almost any marketing strategy that you do systematically over time, the compounding is really, really powerful.

Now, we get to the point where there’s a steady stream of inquiries and I’m not working any harder to produce the content to showcase my expertise than what I did two years or four years or seven years ago when we were first getting started. It’s just compounded itself by building a readership of people who share these articles over time.

Steve Wershing:
On top of that, you had mentioned a minute ago that people refer for their reasons not for ours, because they realize a friend has a need. Sometimes people need that little memory jog, so just sending things out, a system of referring. So instead of us asking a client, who do you know who could use my services, if we are consistently sending things out, to me that’s an active strategy, because not only are you creating that library that reinforces your expertise, but if you have enough people on that list and you send out an article — let’s say I send out an article and Julie gets it, Julie might look at that and say, “Oh, you know my friend Michael should probably see this.” So, it’s a memory jog, so that’s a referral too. It’s not just passing along something.

Michael Kitces:
That’s the nature of what I meant that a good referral strategy is going to have marketing elements along with it. Once you’re doing the marketing elements, they tend to pay off in many ways. So, in the most basic sense, for most of us advisors that have been in business for any period of time, if I go back twenty years, we did a version of this back then. It was go to a networking meeting, get some business cards, any business cards you get, you’re going to add those people to your quarterly newsletter that you’re going to mail to them once every three months. Ultimately, that was really nothing more than I’m trying to generate some referrals and then to the extent that they’re not ready to business with me right now, I’m going to do some direct marketing and send them a quarterly newsletter.

As I view it, even in terms of the platform that I’ve built, I do the exact same thing, it’s just I don’t go to a networking meeting, I create a piece of expert content and put it out there for everyone to share with each other. I don’t sign them up for my quarterly newsletter that I’m going to mail to them, I have them sign up for my mailing list and I’m going to reach out to them daily or weekly, just trying to provide things that are useful and helpful for them. Because I know, when you do that over a sustained period of time, you build a connection to them and eventually, when they actually want to do business, who’s going to be top of mind? The person that they once got referred to who’s been sending them an email every day for a couple of months.

Julie Littlechild:
Just so I can maybe summarize, because a lot of this is very new for advisors, doing this kind of thing. I completely agree, this is true referral strategy, a modern referral strategy. It sounds like there are three components we need to get right, so let me just test this. 1. We need content that is meaningful and shareable; 2. Our website needs to reflect who we work with, so that when somebody gets that content and goes to the site and checks you out, they actually want to continue the conversation; and 3. We need some way, some tool and process to stay in touch over time. I mean, I’m kind of over simplifying, but is that essentially what we’re saying?

Michael Kitces:
Yeah, yeah it is. A key part of it, that I find a lot of advisors miss as well, is even down to number one, what kind of content do you create that’s shareable? The number of people that criticize, even the platform and what I’ve built as Kitces just writes these interminably long articles, no one wants to read that. It’s kind of true, almost no one wants to read that in full length. Except for the people who have that problem and are really anxious about it and looking for someone that has clear expertise to differentiate that they’re the one to work with. They read the whole thing and then they contact me to do business.

I find we seem to get stuck sometimes, it’s sort of a, be careful what you measure or you start building in the wrong direction. We write long content because I don’t actually care of the sheer volume and quantity of times it gets read and shared out there, I care that it reaches the people that might be interested in doing business. The people who have millions of dollars of life savings and are trying to find an expert that can help them to solve their problems, they don’t give their life savings to someone that writes witty four hundred-word articles in three paragraphs. They give their money to someone that demonstrates expertise through in-depth content that really shows they actually know what they’re talking about more than anybody else they’ve gone and looked up online or been referred to.

It’s not just about make things that are shareable as though the wittiest, funniest thing will go viral. It’s about making something that’s relevant and shareable for the people you actually want to reach. Which, at least for our audience are, sophisticated retirees with substantial assets, who have substantial problems that aren’t going to be answered in a brief article. If all we imply is that we give brief answers, because we write brief articles, you don’t get any business from that. So, you measure what produces business results, not just what produces sharing activity.

Julie Littlechild:
That makes me feel better, because every time I sit down to write a four hundred-word blog, it comes out at thirteen hundred-words.

Michael Kitces:
It’s okay to go in-depth. It’s okay that not everyone is going to read it, because the people who really have that problem and are concerned about it, they’re going to read it. And, they do and we have validated it.

Steve Wershing:
I hear that from internet marketers and actually from fundraising professionals from other industries. There was some discussion of length of blog posts or length of correspondence and the two hosts were laughing about, you those three thousand-word posts, who really reads those? Ha ha, nobody reads those. They asked, “Who really reads those?” and the guy who makes a ton of money doing it said, “The people who buy. They read them.”

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

Michael Kitces:
Yup.

Steve Wershing:
And, ninety-nine percent of the people won’t buy. I don’t care about the ninety-nine percent, I want the one percent who will. Like you said Michael, people who are really looking for an answer, they’re looking for more than a superficial, kind of evergreen general kind of a thing. They want some real answers. They want a real discussion of it. If you write the three hundred, four hundred, five hundred-word article, especially about, and I harp on this with advisors all the time, don’t make it evergreen and don’t make it general. Be specific and be timely because if somebody is looking for an answer, that’s what they’re going to be looking for.

Michael Kitces:
The other interesting effect that comes along with this, and part of why I say, good referral strategies are good marketing strategies as well, when you create things like this, effectively my business strategy is, create ongoing valuable content for the people I might do business with, so that either they’ll do business with me or they’ll share it with people they know who might ultimately do business with me. The secondary effect that happens when you produce all that content and you put it on the internet, is search engines like Google, also find it and when people don’t know who to ask for a referral, so they ask Uncle Google for a referral, Uncle Google refers a lot of business to me. Because Google’s search algorithms are built to try to figure out what’s in-depth, high-quality content.

In fact, there’s now a bunch of research that’s shown that Google actually favors longer articles that are more in-depth. They’ve figured out that when people are actually looking for an answer, they need something that’s thorough, they don’t want something that’s superficial. That becomes, jokingly, another referral strategy from Uncle Google. But in practice, it means what we produce to create referrals by sending out these emails and social media updates about the content that gets shared with other people, also becomes a direct marketing strategy as well, because people just search for this information online and they find their way to our site and then they’ve got more questions. Then they contact us or they sign up for our list and they contact us in a couple of months and that’s where part of the business comes from as well. Once you’re producing the stuff that helps the referrals, it tends to be good for the marketing as well, in many different ways.

Julie Littlechild:
I always thought it was “Aunt Google” but who knew. There you go. I guess the elephant in the room, to some extent, is a lot of advisors will hear this and it will be like we’ve asked them to do brain surgery or something, to sit down and create this kind of content. Are there ways for people who maybe aren’t natural writers or find that daunting, to get content out that is still shareable, still relevant, but maybe doesn’t require sitting down and writing lengthy pieces?

Michael Kitces:
Absolutely, I think there are a number of different ways that you can tackle this productively. Number one is the content needs to be created and if you want written articles, the articles need to be written, you don’t need to write them. So, option one, that I still know a number of advisors do, is figure out what you want the article to be about, pull out your smartphone, record you talking about the thing and then send that to an editor that can clean it up into a nice article. The bad news of the modern internet age is it’s obliterating most of the media industry. The good news of the modern internet age, is there are an astonishing number of incredibly high-quality writers out there who are unemployed and looking for work and would love to get paid to transcribe your recordings about your expertise and make them into readable articles. The reality is, just you talking about a topic for ten or fifteen minutes will produce a two to three thousand-word in-depth article. It just, you’ve just kind of got to stay on target for what you’re talking about.

Steve Wershing:
Let’s pursue that a little bit further. I think that’s a great idea, by the way. In addition to that, I think Julie was also asking, what other kinds of ways can advisors make themselves referable? Do you think that there are credible ways of doing that besides content marketing? Or is content really a requirement?

Michael Kitces:
Yes and no. I don’t think content is a requirement per se, but at the end of the day, if you want people to do business with you, at some point along the way, you have to demonstrate your expertise. You have to demonstrate that you actually have the knowledge and the capabilities to solve the problems that are stressing them and keeping them up at night to the point that they want to pay a bunch of money. Eventually, in some way, you have to demonstrate your expertise, which, to me, I give the broad label of content. You need some kind of content at some point, that actually demonstrates that you’re an expert. That doesn’t necessarily have to be written articles as a particular form. If you’re better in front of the camera, you can do that with video. If you prefer just talking and interviewing, you can do it with a podcast like this. If you’re better at talking to people but not being on your own, then you make it an interview format. If you’d rather just actually wax philosophical about your expert views, then make it a solo podcast recording, or just do video to the camera.

Ultimately, I think you need some kind of content, in kind of air quotes, broadly construed. You need something that you can put out there to show that you have expertise to create the trust that’s necessary for someone to do business with you. But it certainly doesn’t have to be written, and there are lots of ways that you can adjust to play to your strengths. Most people are not as writing-inclined as I am, and so they’re not going to do at least the volume of writing that I do. But frankly, the more focused that you are, the less you need to do that anyway. There are some, there was a marketing expert out there named Derek Halpern who made some waves a couple of years ago by pointing out that most marketers screw things up by trying to produce content every day or every week. He literally just does one article a month at the most, and then just spends all the rest of his time making sure that it really gets out there, and built a tremendous business off of one thing a month to demonstrate his expertise.

It certainly doesn’t have to be the constant flow that people may see from a platform like mine. We’ve built up to that over time. But even if you go back and look at the really early archives of what I used to produce, the articles were a little shorter, they didn’t have supporting graphics, I didn’t explain things as well, they kind of wandered more. The truth as well is, this is a skill that you refine over time, as is pretty much anything out there that we do. Don’t get overly anxious about trying to make the perfect thing from day one. The truth is, the first day you do it, the only people who are going to read this anyways are your friends, maybe a couple of clients you already know, and your mom, and your mom will probably be nice about it. Don’t put too much stakes on yourself about trying to make the most amazing thing the first time that you do this. Recognize that you’re going to grow into it over time as well. You just have to get started.

Julie Littlechild:
Maybe I can – this is such great advice, because I think we get caught in this perfectionism trap, I know I do, with content. And it’s what stopped me from doing video for a long time. I’m trying to get past it, because it is just like, let’s just get it out there, people are far more interested in the ideas than having everything perfect. Maybe I could just pivot for a bit and talk about beyond content, is it, looking at the overall client experience, what do you think there are the things that really make advisors referable?

Michael Kitces:
From the client experience end?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, sort of beyond content, what are some of the aspects of the business that you think are really important to driving referrals?

Michael Kitces:
I look at this from two different directions. The first is just, what literally is the experience? What is it like coming into your office, sitting in your front room, going back to the conference room table, sitting down across the table to have a meeting with you, what does that experience look like? I think for a lot of advisors, there’s a part of us that kind of, we wish that stuff didn’t matter. I’m the expert, you’re here to hire me and work with me, so don’t pay attention to the fact that maybe I don’t have the fanciest office space, or the nicest paintings on the wall, things like that. Not that you need to have high-end, fancy, expensive office space, but that stuff matters.

The truth is, when someone is buying a very intangible service, like financial planning, it’s really – you can’t take it for a test drive, you can’t pick it up and play with it for a while, you can’t buy it and then return it if you don’t like it. It’s a really high-stakes decision, and most people have very little to go on to figure out whether you’re a credible expert. They’re grasping for any clues that they possibly can about whether you’re a legitimate, bona fide professional. And that experience of what it’s like meeting you and working with you, what does your website look like, what does your office look like, what do I see when I first walk in, how am I greeted by the person behind the desk, what are you wearing and dress like when you come up to me? You’re hoping to get my life savings, so what have you chosen to show as your first impression to me, the prospect? What does that conference room look like?

Even just, as an advisor, if you never have – most of us, we always meet with clients in our conference room in the same way. There’s always the seat that I sit at, and then we put the clients over on the other side of the table. Just go and sit on the other side of the table and actually even see what it feels like when you sit on their side. I’ve actually heard a number of advisors that did this and discovered all sorts of things. Wow, when you sit in that chair in the middle of the afternoon, all you see is this stuff going on outside the window behind me, over my shoulder, that I never realized. No wonder my clients can’t focus. They’re just looking at what’s going on in the building across the street.

I know one guy that did it and then discovered that his cleaning staff had damaged the painting that sits behind him, and because he always just comes in the door and immediately sat in the chair in front of him, and the clients sit on the other side of the room, he literally hadn’t looked at the painting that’s right behind him for the past month. And the thing had a giant blemish, because they’d splashed some kind of cleaning solvent on it. You’re imagining the client sitting there like, so, this person says I have a great attention to detail and really focus on all the issues for you, and you’re looking behind them at a painting that’s blemished from the cleaning crew that they couldn’t even figure out was damaged, it kind of undermines the confidence. Just seeing what that client experience is like is really powerful.

The second piece that I would add to this is, what makes a great client experience really depends on what kind of client it is that you’re trying to get in the first place. The truth is, this permeates everything, from the client experience to the referral marketing strategy to all the rest. You have to have some kind of focus of who you’re trying to work with, and most advisors I know are terrified to do this, because all they can think about is if they get focused, all of the people that aren’t going to say yes to them because the person they’re talking to isn’t in their target. And what they miss is the sheer number of people that get referred to them and don’t even bother to call and follow through now, or go to their website and don’t contact them, because the marketing material is already so not compelling. But you don’t realize all the people who never call you.

Finding that focus of who really do you want to work with matters immensely. If I’m going to specialize in retirees, I’m going to put a different kind of magazine on my conference room table. I’m going to print my plans with a larger font size. I’m going to handle communication differently, because they’re more likely to want phone calls and face-to-face than emails and text messages. What you do for your target client permeates through everything, the experience, the referral marketing, and the rest. If you don’t have a clear understanding of who exactly it is that you want to serve, what you’ll find is you’ll have lots of introductions, maybe, but very few clients that close. If you ask your clients, they’ll say they’re referring you, and then you look at how many new clients you got from referrals, and find out it’s not many, and this is why. Because you’re not targeted enough, which means everything from your referral marketing to your client experience isn’t targeted enough to resonate and be relevant for them.

Steve Wershing:
Michael, there’s something I’d like to pick up on what you just said there. Julie’s done a lot replicated research over and over, we find that clients are reporting that they’re referring consistently six or seven times more often than advisors are reporting that they’re receiving referrals. My belief is that a big reason for that is that clients are saying nice things about advisors, but they’re not saying compelling things. What kinds of things do you think that an advisor can do to help their clients say more compelling things about them when they make that referral, in the hopes that it will actually cause an introduction?

Michael Kitces:
Again, to me, it’s all around focus of who exactly are you working with, and what kinds of problems do they have? The advisors that are the most successful in this I find, routinely, over and over again, are all people who have some kind of niche, some kind of specialization, some kind of focus. If I say, if you’ve got a complex IRA problem, who do you call? Well, you call Ed Slott. Ed’s the IRA guy. Everybody knows that. And that’s kind of the point. He becomes the natural referral, because he branded himself as the IRA guy, and that’s where he focuses. The advisors that specializing into doctors and dentists just become the go-to person in that space.

I was speaking to Scott Hanson recently, at Hanson McClain. They built most of their business off of just specializing in the employees of utility companies, particularly Pacific Bell, back when there was a Pacific Bell, before they all merged in together. It was all of those ongoing mergers and the downsizings of the utility companies over the past twenty years that drove the bulk of their growth, and they’re a $2-plus billion firm that was built all around knowing how to connect with the utility workers, which are very different than speaking to business owners, which is very different than speaking to highly-affluent retirees. Their average client is $5-600,000 which they got as a pension rollover after hanging cable for twenty-seven years. Their expectations about what good service and a good experience is, is very different than when I’m working with a client who’s been a doctor for thirty-three years, making half a million bucks a year, and has accumulated this giant portfolio, and has certain expectations about what service looks like.

All of it, to me, builds on what is it that you do to really, who are the target clients that you’re trying to serve in the first place? Because that’s what ultimately infuses everything that you do, from the experience, the referral marketing, and the rest. The people who are the best at those high-level touches, that create powerful experiences, are doing things that no one else would even do, because you wouldn’t bother if you weren’t so focused on those clients in the first place.

There’s a firm out in the Midwest that built their niche around succession planning for young doctors, and a big part of their client experience is, they actually made a subsidiary bank that does financing for succession planning for young doctors. Because they found, after working with all of these young doctors, that the biggest problem was they wanted to go in and buy their practices, and no one would finance them. This was ten or fifteen years ago, when it was a lot harder to do professional services buyouts. Part of their powerful client experience and engagement is, they made a service specifically dedicated for those clients that solved their most pressing need, and it powered them forward to more than $1 billion under management in about ten years, by going super deep into this niche. But no other advisor I know has a bank subsidiary to do financing for young doctor buy-ins, nor would you, because it wouldn’t make sense, until and unless you focus your whole business there, and then grew and scaled on that niche.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. I always know the best podcasts are where I just don’t want to stop them. But I will.

Steve Wershing:
We are coming to the end of our time.

Michael Kitces:
We are.

Julie Littlechild:
We are coming to the end of our time, but Michael, thank you so much for this, and, I mean, honestly, for everything that you do for the industry, because I know you’re an incredible resource for so many, and I appreciate you taking a little time to talk to us today.

Michael Kitces:
My pleasure. I hope it’s helpful food for thought.

Julie Littlechild:
Indeed, it is.

Steve Wershing:
Absolutely. Take care.

Julie Littlechild:
Thanks again. Take care.

Steve Wershing:
Hey, folks. Steve again. Thanks for joining us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really helps. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths that Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Until next time, so long.