Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Joe Martin
Alex Katz
Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing.
You’ve probably heard about developing a client persona, but today’s guests have dug into it deeper than most firms and gotten real rewards as a result. We’re talking today with Joe Martin and Alex Katz of Summitry in the San Francisco Bay area of California. It’s a 15-year-old firm with $1.6 billion of assets under management, 1000 clients, and 10 advisors. They’ve really got behind the idea of putting together a client persona and involved the whole team in doing it. And once they had, they saw real results in several areas of their business.
In our conversation, we’ll learn how that persona helped them put into context what their most prized new clients value most, how it helped them refine their marketing and tailor their services. How it even helped them discover the right role for tools and technologies that will appeal most to the clients they most want to attract. It even helped them show their referral partners who best to introduce to them. It’s a very interesting conversation and an exploration into what a well thought out client persona can do for your firm.
And so here now is our conversation with Joe Martin and Alex Katz.
So Joe Martin and Alex Katz, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. We’re so glad you could join us.
Alex Katz:
Happy to be here.
Joe Martin:
Yeah, thank you very much, Julie and Steve.
Steve Wershing:
So Joe, let me start with you. Tell us a little bit about Summitry. Give us a little lay of the land. Who are the clients that you work with, and what kinds of things do you do for them?
Joe Martin:
So, Summitry is an independent wealth management firm. We have about 33 employees, about $1.6 billion in assets under management, and a little fewer than a thousand clients. And these are individuals and families that primarily live in Silicon Valley and in the Bay Area, San Francisco Bay area. And we also manage money for some endowments and foundations. The work we do with clients, it’s financial planning, it’s investment management services. And I think one of the things that makes us unique at least is that we have an in-house portfolio management and research team that selects individual securities for clients. And we have a team of 10 financial advisors and four financial planning associates. And this is the team of certified financial planners and registered paraplanners that work directly with the clients doing the financial planning.
And then on the investment team, nearly all of them are chartered financial analysts. So when we think about what we do for clients, we think that the work we are doing with them is really just about helping them navigate the complexities and the craziness of living in a place like the Bay Area.
Steve Wershing:
Okay, great. And we had the opportunity to work together before Joe. I came out and worked with you on doing some client advisory board meetings, and we’ve turned up some interesting things in those meetings. Can you tell us a little bit about what some of the biggest things were that you learned from your board?
Joe Martin:
Yeah. And I think I would like to start out by saying that I think one of the things that made that entire initiative so effective was really the structure that Steve, you helped us put to it. From everything to who should be on the board, to you coming out and facilitating those conversations so that we could really be there and listen, or be listeners, to what our clients were sharing. But then also summarizing everything that we heard back and communicating it out to them and back to the firm and all of the things that we needed to do to put in place following that to just make it feel … It was a good use of their time. It was a good use of our time and just really effective.
I just want to highlight three things that I think are the most valuable things that we learned. And we talked a lot about … In all of the interactions that we have with clients from meetings to calls to events, what are the things that they were talking with us about that were most valuable to them? We heard from them about what’s meaningful to them. So what should be in the meetings? What should we be talking about with them?
But also I think firms like us are talking a lot these days about adding a lot of technology solutions and platforms and portals. And what came out loud and clear from them was, “These things are all fine and good, but what we appreciate most or value most is the conversations and the brainstorming we have with you.” So when you’re adding these things, make sure that it’s about enhancing those conversations. We in no way, shape, or form want those to replace the conversations. And I think thirdly, we did talk with them about how do we specifically serve them and what should our target client be? We talked about that. And they gave us a lot of feedback about what made us unique and how we serve them. And so who we should be looking to serve especially well.
Julie Littlechild:
And Alex, maybe I can just address this to you, but Joe just mentioned the target client and who you serve. So today, how do you actually define your ideal? And it would be interesting to see how that evolved perhaps as a result of the feedback.
Alex Katz:
Yeah, absolutely. The feedback was a key component in developing our target persona, and then we had a rigorous process that rounded out the development of this fictional family. But I think that’s the most important thing that I would say just to start to describe our target persona rather than going down the path of just coming up with a laundry list of demographic descriptors, we actually created a fictional family. Their name are the Hamlins, that’s Dave and Catherine Hamlin. They’ve got a 12- and 15-year-old kids named Abby and Sam. They live in Palo Alto, California, right up the street from our headquarters. Dave is a 48-year-old executive at a tech company and Catherine has spent her entire career in technology and recently went to launch a startup. So again, rather than saying, “Hey, these are people in their prime earning years, and they have RSU income and ESPPs and concerns about paying for their kids’ college and those sorts of things,” we really attempted to bring them to life so that we not only captured the demographics, but we also could begin to capture the psychographics and really understand what mattered to this fictional family.
And it’s been incredibly empowering to see these Hamlins come to life. We actually found a picture on Google of a representative family that we kind of named the Hamlins. And when we rolled this out to the firm, we actually put a little picture of our fake Hamlins on everyone’s desk, just as a reminder that this is the family that we serve.
Steve Wershing:
That’s awesome.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, that’s the Hamlins.
Steve Wershing:
It’s like going to the store and buying the picture frames with the pictures already in them, and then just hanging those on the wall.
Alex Katz:
That’s right.
Steve Wershing:
And this is why we’re excited to talk with you is because there are a lot of us out there who have been preaching about the idea of putting together a client persona, but we don’t get an opportunity to talk to very many firms that have really gotten behind the idea as thoroughly as you have. And I understand from you that you’ve had some really interesting outcomes as a result of going through this whole process and having this, but before we get to that, what started you on the road down creating a client persona in the first place?
Alex Katz:
Yeah, it’s a pretty straight forward, but I think fundamental to creating any entrepreneurial offer is answering the question of who is your target audience? Who do you serve? What do they ultimately care about? And then how can you build an offer that is specifically relevant, effective, compelling to that target audience? So at a human level it really means knowing what makes your target persona tick. And then once you have that, so many other elements of what you do just come into clear focus. So for us it was start with the fundamental and then work at a strategic level of bringing it to life.
Julie Littlechild:
So because a lot of people are not familiar with necessarily what personas are, could you just give us the quick definition, your words, what is the difference between a target and a persona?
Alex Katz:
So ultimately it’s all just a way of answering the question, who is the person that you serve or people that you serve? And I think the layer below that is, what do they care about? What are their concerns? And knowing intimately what a specific group of people cares about allows you to be so much more focused in the way you build a client experience, build a planning offer, build a portfolio design, create your marketing. Everything ties back to having a target persona at the end of the day.
Joe Martin:
And I don’t want to over simplify this, but when I think about persona, just the word persona versus target, it humanizes it. It is that person, that human being on the other side of the table who we’re there to take care of. So I just like how persona humanizes.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. I was going to say a target just comes … When you’re just dealing with statistics and demographics, it comes across as a little sterile. And it sounds like these personas, you start thinking of them as actual people.
Alex Katz:
You absolutely do down to the point of, “Okay, if this is our target persona, what magazines do we have in the waiting room because what do they care about? What do they want to read?” You don’t get that if you just are working with a list of demographics, but you get that when you start to bring this fictional family to life and really understand again what they care about.
Julie Littlechild:
So what are the Hamlins reading these days?
Alex Katz:
What are the Hamlins reading? It’s all tech, tech executive magazines. No, it’s Tech Executive. It’s parenting. And it’s concerns about their aging parents. At the end of the day, it’s navigating the craziness of life in the Bay Area and there are an endless list of concerns. We don’t want to be too hyper Bay Area focused by saying that life in the Bay Area is completely unique. We know that 48-year-old executives all over the country in any urban center are going to have a similar list of concerns that they’re dealing with. And yet in the Bay Area things tend to just be exaggerated, tied to cost of living and the tech sector and the pressure of your neighbors going to work for some startup and all of those unique concerns of the ecosystem in which we live.
Steve Wershing:
No, I think one of the things that’s interesting about how you undertook this project … Joe mentioned that you have 10 advisors there. I believe that when you talked about how you brought these things together, that you involved a lot of the people there in actually developing persona. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of designing this profile?
Joe Martin:
Yeah. And going back a little bit to one of the questions Julie asked earlier too about some of the feedback from the client advisory board. We took initial steps to define this persona, and one of the pieces of feedback for them was it just didn’t capture the warmth of who we are with our clients. And you hear a lot about us talking about this persona. We’re calling it a family. So we went back in this process, and we took a step back and we asked, coming back from the client advisory board, asked the advisors, “Tell us about your best client relationships. And not necessarily on who the clients you like the most but those who you feel like you are adding the most substantive value to, like the ones that you’re able to take care of the best up to this point.”
And then we said, “Well, think about who that should be going forward. Where is it the same? Where is it different?” And so all of that initially provided a lot of helpful perspective for the leadership team when we then went back in the room to put all of this together and really hash out who should this be? What is the direction we should take? And what are the subtleties of this person or this family that we should be going to target?
So we based it on what they shared with us. And then we worked a lot with Schwab’s practice management team. They have a program to help firms work through this process and figure out all of the demographics, the psychographics, and a lot of those things that Alex talked about. And so then with all of that in mind, we went to work and we defined who it was from soup-
Alex Katz:
And I’ll add just because some of your listeners might be interested, I think it was about a three-month process from the time that we declared, “Hey, we want to come up with a target persona,” to really coming to an agreement that the Hamlins were it.
Julie Littlechild:
And so now you’ve got the Hamlins in everybody’s head and in the frame on the desk. What were some of the outcomes of that? How did defining that then translate into changes?
Alex Katz:
Yeah, Julie, they’re all over the firm. And the picture of the Hamlins I think is most emblematic of the most significant impact, which was the impact of the internal conversations that are happening. So before we started changing anything about our offer or our marketing or our client experience, we had an opportunity to get the entire firm together, talk about why having a target persona was important, and then what it means to our future, and introduce the Hamlins and have people really ask questions, challenge components of what we’d built into this target persona. And I will say, the Hamlins, as a definition, have certainly evolved since that initial conversation with the team.
But most importantly here and most meaningfully, having the Hamlins gave us a filter against which we can evaluate any strategic decision that we make going forward. And in the year since we rolled out the Hamlins, it gets brought up, I don’t want to say daily, but certainly weekly in strategy meetings, team meetings. We bring a new client through the door. It’s, “Hey, we brought in a new Hamlin client.” It’s, “Hey, what would the Hamlins care about” when we’re talking about enhancements to our planning offer? So it’s very much become part of our ongoing conversation.
Steve Wershing:
And so tell us … You said that once you rolled it out to the advisors, there was some evolution that went on as people talked about it. What kinds of things evolved from those conversations?
Alex Katz:
Well, I would say one of the biggest changes early on was when we were working with the Schwab consulting team, as Joe mentioned, their strong push is you choose one individual. It’s not a family. And for a while, we were-
Steve Wershing:
Oh, really?
Alex Katz:
Yeah, it was Dave Hamelin for quite a while. And toward the end of the process, candidly the leadership team, it just didn’t feel right to us that it was just Dave because that wasn’t representative of the kind of relationships that we have with our clients. And we sort of argued the point with the Schwab team and said, “Look, for many of your RIAs that you work with, it’s going to be just one. But for us it needs to be the family.” And then it became Dave and Katherine and Abby and Sam. I think that was probably the most significant change in the evolution.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting.
Julie Littlechild:
So one just quick question because I want to dive further into this, but I know that many folks listening to this will be asking what about the people who aren’t the Hamlins? Does this help you say no to people who don’t fit? And what about those existing clients who don’t fit into this persona?
Alex Katz:
Yeah. So the, the way we rolled this out to the firm and the way we still think about this is that picture your classic target bull’s eye, and the Hamlins are dead center bull’s eye on the target. But there are rings going out from the bull’s eye, and those are clients that we can serve very, very well as well. So we want to roll out … or we wanted to roll out the Hamlins to give us focus and to give us more of a path forward and yet I think that a lot of your listeners are probably sitting here going, “Well, I don’t want to commit to just one kind of client that I want to work with.” And we still serve many, many clients who fit outside of the classic definition of who the Hamlins are.
So it’s not about necessarily turning down clients who come our way. What it is about is if we’re going to go out and develop a new strategic partnership, we’re going to look at that partnership through the lens of, “Is this going to bring us more Hamlins or is this just going to bring us more clients?” And so that’s where you get the real power from a business development standpoint, which I think is really the core of your question.
Steve Wershing:
And if memory serves, I believe that once you started working on this … Do I remember it correctly that you discovered that your target client, the Hamlins, was not the same as your average client?
Joe Martin:
It’s true. A lot of our clients are not Hamlins. But this kind of gets … I wanted to get to Julie’s question with this too. The clients who aren’t Hamlins, they have their children, are Hamlins. And so I think as we’ve done a lot of work over the years also with client segmentation and just the service level agreements we have with our various clients, we’ve looked at how do we enhance the advisor’s ability to take care of the concerns that are the Hamlins concerns? But how does that also take care … Some of the concerns are similar to their parents’ concerns, but we can go back and forth. We can help the parents. We can help the kids. We can help the grandkids. It really is about a multigenerational relationship as well.
Alex Katz:
And Steve, I think that there’s kind of a jumping off the cliff element to your question too, where any firm that starts as more of a generalist RIA that’s working … You’ve got your minimum, and you’re working with clients who meet that minimum. If, at some point in the evolution, and our firm’s been around for 15 years, if at some point in the evolution you say, “You know what? We want to have a target persona now.” You need to acknowledge that quite a few of your existing clients are certainly getting to be outside of the narrow definition of your new target. And yet you need to have that gut check and say, “We’ve taken great care of these clients for a decade and a half. We’re going to take great care of those clients. And yet going forward we just want to have a higher degree of focus.”
Steve Wershing:
Another aspect of that too is that I think sometimes advisors forget that they may have very powerful things that draw their target clients to them, but once they’ve had a business for 10 or 15 years like you have, that when you look at the clients that you have and the mass of clients that you have, you forget that you didn’t attract them the way they are. You attracted them 10 or 15 years ago. And they were potentially different people 10 or 15 years ago. So your messaging, your targeting, could actually gradually drift off target unless you keep reminding yourself of the fact that, “Look, we’re trying to attract these people as they come in. They’re still going to be with us 20 years from now, and they’ll be different at that point, but we’re trying to attract these people in this age bracket and with these psychographic characteristics.”
Alex Katz:
Absolutely. And our offer needs to evolve with those clients as they move through those stages of life. So yeah, dead on.
Julie Littlechild:
So can you sort of connect the dots between any specific ways that your client service or your client experience would have changed on the basis of this? You’ve talked about your internal filters, which I’d have to agree. It’s probably one of the most significant things that you can have in place, but is there anything that would be noticeable from the client’s perspective?
Joe Martin:
Yeah. I think the things that are most noticeable from the client perspective, and as we talk about this client persona, I mean these are, as Alex mentioned a lot, I mean these are two very busy people. They’re working. It’s not necessarily easy for them to be coming into our office four times a year to meet with us. They need to interact with us or engage with us in a different way through different mediums. And so we’ve really had to evolve and refine and enhance all of our ways of engaging them through video conferencing, through software.
But again, as I mentioned earlier on, maybe we’re doing interactive planning with them through a screen sharing environment, but there is still that screen sharing environment where we are brainstorming, collaborating with them. Because that’s the other thing. This Hamlin, these are people who really want to brainstorm. They want to partner with us. They want to have a conversation and try to figure it out together. It’s not just about we’re experts who have the advice or the recommendations for them. They really want to hash it out. And so all of that has just led to a different way of engaging clients just on a different level, partnering with them.
Julie Littlechild:
It strikes me that it must bring an enormous sense of relief in a way to be able to filter against that. So if you took something like video conferencing, well, yes we hear important and inevitably if you’re trying to make everyone happy, you end up doing nothing because there’s some non-Hamlins who don’t want the video conferencing. Does that give you the freedom to just say, “No, this is right for this group, and that’s what needs to drive our decision making?”
Joe Martin:
Yes, and it starts with that. We exist to be of value to our clients. And so when these particular people say, “This is how I need to engage with you,” we get better at it. And that’s where we focus our attention. And frankly, there’s other clients that we’ve had for 10, 15, 20 years, and people don’t need to engage with us that way. But the ones who do want to, we need to continue to improve our way of engaging them through that meeting.
Steve Wershing:
And so how has getting a better understanding of this client persona affected your marketing and messaging strategies?
Alex Katz:
Well, I’ll take that one. So taking a step back, I think the way I would contextualize the impact that having the Hamlins had on our firm, and I’ll try to make this brief, but it’s really in five different areas, marketing being one of them. So marketing, enhancements to our planning offer, enhancements to our portfolio offer, conversations with our referral partners, and then hiring of specific capabilities within our firm.
So on the marketing side, the easiest way to think about this is pretty much every registered investment advisor in the Bay Area has a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge on their homepage, or their website has the picture of the investment team, talks a lot about ourselves. And it can be very, “Me too,” if you read 15 of these things back to back. And we are in the process of making this enhancement to our marketing. But ideally what we want is for the Hamlins to show up- and people go to a website to validate that you’re a good firm for them, but we want the Hamlins to show up, see our website, and immediately identify, “Yes, this is the kind of firm that works for me. I see myself in this. I see my concerns being brought to life.” Much more about the Hamlins than the classic RIA website, which tends to be about the people at the firm. So that’s one component of marketing.
But then if you think about outbound marketing, when we go out into the world, we’re now not just doing this sort of sponsor a whole at a golf tournament or throw a half page ad in some local magazine sort of blanket advertising. Instead, we can actually be very targeted and say, “Where do the Hamlins live? What do they care about? What are they reading? What’s the best place to find them if we want to communicate with them?” So we’re at stages of developing all of that marketing messaging. And the other thing that I would share here, not to belabor marketing, but we actually partnered with a firm down in southern California that helped us refine the messaging to the Hamlins.
So they actually interviewed a group of our clients who we identified as being Hamlin-esque. And then they went on into the world and found 25 non-clients of ours who also fit the demographic of the Hamlins. And they spent significant time interviewing those two groups and really learning not only what mattered to them, but what would be effective language in speaking to them. So then we now have that as our foundational language that we can use in all of these different marketing strategies that we put into play.
So that covers marketing. This is something that I’m very passionate about, so I could talk about the other four implementations for hours. But I’ll spare the listeners unless you want to dig into any of those other areas.
Julie Littlechild:
Is there another area that you would touch on in particular that just is – because it’s a great way to categorize it.
Alex Katz:
I’ll do two, and I’ll do really quickly. So on referral partnerships, which is obviously the bread and butter for most RIAs, when you go out to your referral partners and it’s scary to say, “Hey, this is who we’re focused on going forward,” because it’s going to be probably a bit of a departure from the way that referral partner has seen you in the past. But I will tell you it’s been very empowering those conversations with our COIs, and we’re in a referral channel as well. And immediately you start to see the kinds of people that you want to work with showing up from your referral partners because most referral partners are thinking, “Okay, how should I be thinking about Summitry?” If a human being who walks into my office who looks, sounds, and feels like this kind of person, if we can help them identify that this person is a great fit for us, we’re making their job of referring to us much, much easier.
So that’s been a big one. On the planning offer, and Joe, please hop in on any of this, but on planning, the easiest way that I would describe it is if we had identified that our target audience was going to be 85-year-old widowers, then we would probably be focused on planning topics like generational transfer of wealth, long-term care, everything that goes along with that phase of life. If you’re focused on clients who are 48 years old, prime earning years, living in the Bay Area, get pulled in a thousand different directions, well we need to have deep domain expertise in RSU income, ESPPs.
And then from a more personal human planning standpoint, it’s, “Okay, maybe you’ve got a parent who is going to require some financial support from you. How should you be thinking about that?” Maybe we need to have a lot more depth into how we work with people for college planning beyond just, “Hey, start a 529 plan, and let’s project what private school is going to cost in six years when you’re 12 year old’s a freshman. How can we bring more depth, more expertise to the specific well-defined set of concerns that these people are living with? That’s really where it’s showing up on the planning side.
Steve Wershing:
I love how you’re using the persona not only to work on your marketing but also to refine your service offering, what kinds of things you do for people. But you brought up helping to clarify for referral partners who they should be sending over. Have you found that that having a persona and talking about it has affected other kinds of referrals, for example, from other existing clients?
Alex Katz:
We haven’t gone down the path with any strong strategy at this point to take out the new target persona to our existing clients because you need to be a little bit delicate there. What we have done though, and this was another project that we worked on with the Schwab consulting team, is we’ve worked on having very clear stories that we tell our clients about the types of clients that we’re working with, the value that we’re adding to their lives. And when we’re creating those stories, which are obviously all based on existing clients, but when we’re choosing the stories that we want to share with our existing clients, we’re choosing Hamlins of course.
So a story may be, “Hey, we just received this referral from a long-term client of ours.” And to Joe’s point, the referral was their adult children who are now in their forties. And first and foremost, that’s incredibly rewarding to us to now be working for a second generation for this family. But the kids are going through these challenges that are very Hamlin kind of challenges. And then we can speak to our existing clients about how we help those referred adult children work through those challenges. So we’re beginning to reframe ourselves for our existing clients through that process.
Joe Martin:
And you talked about just making, declaring, or committing to a direction. I think that is the hardest part. And the custodian, that happens inside of the firm. The custodians that any of us work with have a lot of internal practice management resources that you can rely on in leverage, and it’s just part of your relationship with them. So you can go there and do that if you first internally say, “Okay, this is what we need to do,” or “This is what we want to do and this is why. This is why it’s important for the people who we serve.”
Julie Littlechild:
You as a firm are very thoughtful, very strategic, very focused. I’ve known that for many years, but we hear that coming through. For those advisors who may not have the resources to invest in marketing the firm and this and that, do you have any thoughts on how they can perhaps get started with the process that you’ve gone through?
Alex Katz:
I think the biggest investment that any firm makes is the time to sit down, be deliberate through the process and make a declaration that you have a path going forward. Yes, it’s wonderful that our firm has the resources where we can hire the brand messaging firm and hire the marketing firm. But candidly, if we had just created the Hamlins and then gone out to our referral partners and it was kind of a classic CPAs and family law attorneys and the kinds of COIs that every RIA works with, if we had just gotten to the point of very clearly communicating this target persona with that group with minimal hard dollar investment, that in and of itself I think would’ve been a very effective strategy.
Joe Martin:
All I’ll add to that is just the importance of talking with clients and understanding in their language and their words from their perspective, how is it that you come through for them and really identifying where you do an especially good job of that and building and building and building on that.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Well there’s a lot of really good information in here, and there’s lots more that we could cover, but we are coming up on time. I wanted to thank you both for joining us. This has been a really interesting exploration of something that a lot of us are evangelizing and very few have the kind of depth of experience that you do. Before we wrap up, do you have any specific other advice for our listeners that we haven’t already covered?
Alex Katz:
Well, I’ll piggyback on the point that Julie made. So yes, our firm is very deliberate and very strategic. And that again does not require an investment other than time. And for those listening out there who don’t have some structured practice for annual planning and then for revisiting that annual plan quarterly, I would strongly urge people to make that investment of time. Just putting a plan down on paper, sitting with your colleagues, sitting with the leadership team of your firm, and getting clear on what’s most important to the firm and then attacking that with purpose, with conviction, with resolution. That I think is the make or break for any firm that is truly committed to growing, just having the focus and having a structure to support that focus.
Steve Wershing:
Well, that’s excellent advice. So Joe Martin and Alex Katz, thank you both for joining us on the show. We really appreciate your time and your willingness to share this great experience with us.
Alex Katz:
Thank you both.
Joe Martin:
Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Julie.
Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. 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. Thanks so much for joining us.