Evelyn Zohlen on Becoming a Magnet for Your Ideal Clients

Julie Littlechild:       
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I were excited to speak with Evelyn Zohlen. Evelyn is the founder of Inspired Financial, which is a fee only wealth management practice that specializes in serving women in transition in Southern California. We talk at length about what that means, and get deep into how she’s built a business that truly serves and supports this target, and we talk at length about how she has successfully built a strong referral network among centers of influence because she’s so focused.

Evelyn is very actively involved in supporting the industry, has more energy for giving back than I’ve seen in many people. She served on the Board of Directors of the Financial Planning Association, she was an adjunct professor in the Personal Financial Planning Program at the University of California at Irvine, and serves on their Advisory Board for the Center for Investment and Wealth Management. But that’s not enough. She’s a community leader who currently serves on the Board of Governors for the Center Club in Orange County, and in the past on the Board of Directors for WomanSage. And I still find it incredibly cool that she served as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force. With that, let’s get on with the show.

So Evelyn, welcome, I am just so excited to talk to you today.

Evelyn Zohlen:
Thank you, I’m really glad to be here.

Julie Littlechild:
Steve and I, I know, have both talked to you about your business and what you’ve done generally but also in this area of niche marketing. So, it was an easy thing for us to come to a conclusion that we really wanted to talk to you about this because it’s really impressive. But maybe I can just start with this concept of niche. This is clearly a significant part of your business and your success. Maybe you can give us a little background on your business and describe the clients that you’re working with today.

Evelyn Zohlen:
Sure. Inspired Financial is a boutique wealth management firm and in our profession, of course, that’s all code for different things. Boutique means that we’re of modest size. We’re about $135 million in assets under management as part of our wealth management services. When we say wealth management for us that means that we’re doing comprehensive deep dive financial planning for all of our clients and that we have relationships with them and their other professional advisors in support of our clients’ goals. We have a team of six professionals here at Inspired Financial. There are four on our planning team and then we have two operations/client services folks that help take good care of our clients. And those clients that I keep mentioning are a pretty unique group, they are predominantly women in transition. And that is the niche that we focus on serving. And when we made the decision to focus on serving women in transition, it’s been, oh boy, almost ten years ago now, we thought initially that would be widows and divorcees. And it’s true that that is still the vast majority of new clients that come to us. But after having focused on taking care of these ladies and their families for all of these years, we’ve decided that women are pretty much always in transition. And those transitions take a lot of different forms. The two obvious are the divorce and loss of a spouse, but losing both parents, selling a small business, and a lot in the last few years of what we have dubbed late life involuntary career changes. I’m sure you get that scenario, what that is, is a woman she’s in her late 50’s, she’s been a successful career woman and is in senior management or even in a C level position at a company that is merged, downsizing, no longer needs her services. She’s offered a severance package and is told ‘thank you for your work all these years and buh-bye, and now she is left with that question of am I going to be ok, which is the foundation of a lot of these women in transition. What they’re concerned about is ‘am I going to be ok.’ And we’re pleased that we’re able to answer that.

Steve Wershing:
Are there things that tie those three groups together? Because on the surface there are certainly things that certainly make them different but are there things that tie them together as well?

Evelyn Zohlen:
That’s a great question. And we’re asked a lot about the whole ‘really, women in transition, does that mean you won’t work with anybody else?’ The primary driver is in fact, is it a woman? And secondly, is she going through a significant change in her life that warrants a trusted advisor to come alongside her and help educate and empower her so she can make good decisions about navigating this transition and coming out stronger than she ever thought she could on the other side. Having said all of that, these women, sometimes their transitions don’t include getting rid of or having lost a spouse. So we’ll tease that if she happens to show up with a husband, dad, brother or uncle in tow, we’re not going to kick him to the curb.

Julie Littlechild:
You’re not going to ask them to leave?

Evelyn Zohlen:
No, he doesn’t have to sit in the car while we’re having our meeting. So long as she says so he is welcome to be part of this. But all teasing aside, we have found that we are most successful with working with women and their partners where the woman is a primary decision maker, or at least a 50% decision maker and her financial choices and everything that we do at Inspired Financial is geared toward that woman and how she likes to communicate.

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