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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. On this episode, we talk with Meg Bartelt, found and lead planner of Flow Financial Planning. Meg has the distinction of having mastered the virtual experience before many advisors were forced to in the recent pandemic. She has an entirely virtual practice focusing on early to mid career tech professionals. And while being virtual makes her somewhat unique among financial advisors, she stresses that the important things are the same as for any financial advisor, building relationships, developing expertise that her target market needs, and providing great service.

She developed an expertise, for example, in stock options and stock ownership, something that many of her target clients need to handle. She coaches clients through job changes because her target market tends to be fairly mobile. So she has a lot of lessons that we can all benefit from, but she talks about why it’s even more important for her with a virtual practice to focus on the needs of that target client because where most advisors can meet prospective clients at the chamber of commerce or at the local country club, she has to compete with the entire internet. One thing that had us particularly interested in talking with Meg is that she can attract a consistent stream of referrals with a purely virtual experience, something that many advisor struggles with. And toward the end of the episode, she talks about how she handles those referrals when she comes in, when they come in.

She has a lot of great ideas that would be applicable regardless of the environment. And so without any further delay, let’s get to our conversation with Meg Bartelt. Meg Bartelt, welcome to Becoming Referable. Thanks for joining us.

Meg Bartelt:
Thank you.

Steve Wershing:
So we have a bunch of things that we want to ask you about, but let’s just start out with: What in your mind makes your firm, Flow Financial Planning, unique?

Meg Bartelt:
Sure. Well, I think it’s unique to begin with for the same reason that I am unique, because I just made a business the exact way that I would want to run things that reflects my personality, reflects the way I think about the world. And it was a real sort of joy and privilege to be able to get to construct a firm exactly around how Meg’s brain works, but that’s exactly what I did. And probably perhaps more relevant is the fact that I have a really specific target market. I work with women in their early to mid career in the technology industry, and have over the last four and a half years, really iterated on: What did those women need at those two career stages, at those two stages of life? And just really customized everything about the firm to serve those women.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah, so that’s interesting. And I think it would be even cooler if you renamed your firm Meg’s Brain because I think that would be fascinating.

Julie Littlechild:
Can I ask about that just before we even move on? Because I do want to talk about how you built the firm around that target. But when you say you built something that reflected you, which I think is something we all want to do, what did that mean to you?

Meg Bartelt:
Sure. I can probably best answer that by saying, by explaining where I worked before I started my own firm. So I’m a career changer, I actually started working in the tech industry myself. But when I switched to the financial planning world, I worked for a couple of fee only registered investment advisory firms, who were fairly traditional in their approach, their fee model, their target market. They were both investment oriented and focused on the retirement population. And I’ve always said retirees deserve love too, it just wasn’t interesting for me. Here I was in my early 30s, I wanted to work with people who were more like me, which is a story you might hear a lot.

So I wanted to work with people who were in sort of that thick of life, they’re having babies, they’re changing careers, they’re buying homes, going back to school, climbing the career ladder, all those things that I was in the midst of, and had been in the midst of, and was going to be in the midst of for the next few years. So there was that part of building a business that was like me. Here are these people I want to work with, and I can’t work with them in these businesses I’ve been working for as an employee. And also, I have a personality and I wasn’t really able to let the Meg flag fly in these two RIAs.

The second one I worked for was run by an Evangelical Christian man. It was a good firm. He was a good man, good work for their clients. And I just did not fit, and I really wanted to just be comfortable. I didn’t want to have to watch out for how I expressed myself. I am a casual person in speech and dress and all of that. And this firm was much more conservative and buttoned up, and so I just had to watch myself all the time there, and I really just wanted a firm where that part at least was going to be easy because I could just be me.

Julie Littlechild:
Right.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Yeah, interesting. So two questions about, let’s talk about that backstory first. So you said you worked in the tech industry, and then you moved over and worked for a couple of fee only RIAs. How and why did you make the transition from tech into financial planning?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. Well, there was both a push and a pull. So the push out of tech was I simply wasn’t interested anymore. I’d been a technical writer for most of my career in tech, and I gotten training and gotten certificates, and sort of scaled what seemed like a very short career ladder in technical writing, and I just wasn’t interested. I really enjoyed the people I had met there. I loved where I was living. I was living in San Francisco, sort of the heart of the tech industry, but was just sort of bored and uninspired, so that was pushing me out.

And I don’t really remember when it dawned on me that there was this career called financial planning. I was privileged enough to come from a family where my father watched Louis Rukeyser on Wall Street Week every Friday. I was sort of familiar with the investing side of things. I think it’s probably because I was in San Francisco, which is this just probably the biggest hub of fee only wealth management in the country, very active professional community there, so I got … Big FPA chapter, big NAPFA chapter, local university, Golden Gate University has a masters program in financial planning, which I actually eventually enrolled in. And it was just so easy to get information about the financial planning career while in San Francisco. And it really appealed to me. I liked managing my own finances. It seemed to have, it scratched the sort of analytical itch at that point, and so that was sort of what attracted me to the career.

And of course, since then, I’ve moved. Well, my focus has become much broader than just analytical. I’m much more interested in sort of the behavioral side of things at this point. But yeah, that was the push and pull into this career.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting. And one thing I appreciate about your website, I think your marketing communications are really clear. And now knowing that you have a background in technical writing, I guess that makes a lot more sense. So you’re really clear on your site about who you want to attract and what your unique value is to them. You mentioned women in tech. Can you elaborate a little bit on that? And tell us what is unique about that population. What’s unique about the services that they need from somebody like you?

Meg Bartelt:
Sure. Yeah. It’s even more narrow than women in tech. What I stay away from is women in tech who are on the verge of retiring because I know from my presence in this financial planning profession that retirement planning is just a robust study. I would want to have special designations and take special classes to be able to serve that population so well. And so that’s one of the reasons why I focus on sort of the early to mid career when they’re still very much enmeshed in accumulating assets and figuring out their career. That’s where I feel as if my existing skillset is most useful.

Now how my firm can bring particular value to the early to mid career set, my team and I have actually sort of broken down our target market into sort of two smaller target markets, just around those two career stages. And we find generally women in their early careers in tech tend to … The help they need is, oh my God, I just came from a normal middle class family, and now I’m earning well into the six figures in my salary. And on top of that, I have this equity compensation thing. I have no context for understanding the level of compensation, or how it works, and I don’t have anyone to turn to. My parents can’t help me.

And so my experience having gone through that myself in the tech world, and then understanding those technical issues and how to help these earlier career women wrap their heads around. Okay, this is how you can actually use that high level of compensation and the slightly complicated kind of compensation to really set yourself up to have this abundance of choice and flexibility in the future. And I think that issue of having choice, building enough financial strength so that you as a woman have the choice to say yes or no to things in your life, I think that’s very powerful.

These women really want to feel as if they are in control of their finances and their destiny, to put it very broadly. And then we move onto the mid career women in tech. And I find that what generally or most frequently comes up there is sort of glibly call it our existential crisis clients, women who have been in the tech industry for maybe a decade, kind of like me in my early 30s. All right. I’ve been doing this. I’ve earned some good money, interesting, not really feeling this anymore. This is not feeling good to me as a career I want to stay in for a lot longer. But they don’t really have an idea of what they want to do. Where do they want to go from here?

And so for them, I think one of the values we bring is again, if we can help you understand what your financial situation is, help you understand how you can make it even stronger, if that’s necessary, some of our clients come in already fundamentally financially very strong. Then I can tell you, look, you may, I give her permission as your financial planner, to go out and radically just overturn your life and do something different. Do that thing you’ve long been wanting to do, but have been afraid to do it because maybe it’s not prudent, maybe it’s irresponsible. And my parents taught me I was just supposed to work the 9:00 to 5:00 until I retire at age 65.

But helping them sort of move out of that paralysis. I’m not pleased with my career, but I’m afraid of doing anything different. We can oftentimes come in there and say, “Look, you’ve done really well in saving, even if it hasn’t been intentional,” or you’ve got this really strong financial foundation. And you are smart and well educated and well connected. And you’ve got great job skills. Go forth and do something different. You can do it. It is a reasonable thing for you to do. And it almost is those mindsets that it can help the clients with that is the biggest value at those two stages of the career.

Julie Littlechild:
It sounds like you didn’t find it particularly daunting, or maybe you did, to really say, “This is who I’m going to work with,” because we know this is something that a lot of advisors feel challenged by. Can you tell us a bit about what it took, or if you needed to convince yourself that you could narrowly focus your business?

Meg Bartelt:
Sure. Sure. I did not start of specifically with women in their early to mid career in tech. I did start by saying, “Okay. I need,” I told myself I need a niche, but I know that Steve will contest that term. So I need a target market, and I actually used a worksheet, basically an exercise from Kristin Harad, who’s a marketing consultant down in San Francisco, to sort of just march me through questions to help narrow down the target market. And I actually started with working mothers in tech, which was even more closely aligned with who Meg is because I was a working mother and I used to be in tech. But then I didn’t actually get much traction on the specific target market, and eventually learned by having a working mother in tech tell me, “Meg, I would love to work with you. I don’t have any time. I’ve got this whole working mother thing. And I’ve also got this job in tech thing.”

But still, even while I was still very explicit about the working mother in tech target market in my marketing, I was simply getting women in tech to come work with me. So it was through attracting that sort of slightly different target market. I then shifted my messaging really only about six months in maybe, after starting my firm. But I’ll say the reason I sort of drank the target market Kool-Aid from the beginning is because I run a virtual firm. And if I had wanted to start a firm in Bellingham, Washington that worked with affluent retirees, I probably could have done that, but I had no interest in that.

Julie Littlechild:
So can you talk to us about that virtual thing? It’s such an interesting concept. But I guess first of all, what made you decide to go that route? And can you tell us a little bit about it?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. What made me decide to go virtual is I am of the belief that had I wanted to have a locally focused business, I would have had to work with the affluent retiree set.

Julie Littlechild:
Right, okay.

Meg Bartelt:
So I had to be virtual in order to work with the kind of people I wanted to work with, which was women in the tech industry. And so it wasn’t even really a choice. It was just, well, this is a requirement. So how does one run an entirely virtual practice?

Steve Wershing:
That’s really interesting because I could see a lot of other advisors trying to figure out what their proposition was going to be, and who they were going to focus on, and really kind of look at who they had access too. I think just being able to say, “These are the people I want to work with, and well, there aren’t that many of them around here, so I guess I have to do it this way.” I think that’s really creative. I think that’s really interesting.

Meg Bartelt:
Well, thanks. I have found that a lot of decisions in my business have been made very simple by knowing, by having a very clear idea of whom I’m targeting, whom I’m trying to work with, and that was probably the first one.

Julie Littlechild:
What were some of the challenges in setting up that kind of business?

Meg Bartelt:
Oh, probably the first challenge that lasted a good year was the question that everyone will ask about running a virtual practice is: How do I get clients?

Steve Wershing:
Yep, sure.

Meg Bartelt:
And that made the first year really rough. I like to share with people that even though it was not in any clinically diagnosed, I had something like a nervous breakdown about eight months in, where I just basically shut the doors of my business for a week and just cried because I was not growing very quickly at all. I was, I knew from the beginning that because I was going to be virtual, I needed to have content marketing. Right? I needed to distinguish myself on the inter tubes, so that people could either find me, or if they found me, I would stand out from the thousands of other financial advisors on the internet, so I took to blogging. I like writing. I’m good at writing. So for the first probably two years, I blogged weekly. They sucked hard for the first few months. It was the classic: Should you contribute to a Roth IRA or a pretax IRA? Kind of blog post.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s funny, I was just thinking that this morning.

Meg Bartelt:
Right. And now I know that sort of blog post does not attract any eyeballs, but I didn’t know what I was doing. And so I just had to write enough blog posts to finally hit some sort of stride and get comfortable with my voice. And as I got clients, I got better at identifying, oh, these are the questions that actual clients actually have. And then I could start writing blog posts about that. So I blogged regularly. Yeah?

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. I wanted to highlight a couple of things that you just said because you just brought up a couple really important points. One is that when I work with people, I’m sure Julie feels this as well, and I think this is a pretty common among consultants is that we work with folks who have, there is a resistance that comes up from clients sometimes because they’re uncomfortable doing something, and they don’t think that they can do it well. And part of one of the really important things is that it’s okay to do it not that well for a little bit, so you can get some chops and learn how to do it better. And that can be really hard, so I think it’s really neat that you were able to get the courage to do it, even if it wasn’t the kind of quality where you were going to end up, and to do that for a while. And what was the other thing I was going to say? It’s totally, totally gone.

Meg Bartelt:
Well, feel free to interrupt me again when that comes back. Yeah, I mean, the nice thing looking back at my initial incredibly crappy blog post is no one was reading those. No one knew I existed. Right? It was just a typing exercise, really.

Steve Wershing:
The other thing that you mentioned was listening to your clients to figure out what to read, or what to write about. And because there are a lot of advisors that when we say, “It would be great if you could generate content, if you could do thought leadership, if you could write about things to show people your expertise.” And all of us probably go to, “Well, what should I write about?” And you try to dream it up yourself. And really, if you’re talking with clients on a regular basis, they’ll tell you.

Meg Bartelt:
Absolutely.

Steve Wershing:
John Anderson has said that on his blog, that I never have a shortage of things to write about because every time I talk to advisors, which I do all day long, they give me ideas.

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. I mean, right now is a prime example of that in my firm because I do work with women in tech. And as of early this year, we had a big handful of clients who either currently work for Airbnb, or used to, and so have a goodly amount of stock in Airbnb. And now Airbnb has filed to go public at some point. So it was really easy for me to think, “You know what, I should just write an entire series of blog posts about this Airbnb IPO and how you can prepare for it, and what you should do if I have stock options, or what you should do if you have restricted stock units.” And I can get really specific about this one company because I don’t need that many clients. You know how many thousands of people work for Airbnb, so that’s really fun for me to just get really extremely narrow. If you have RSUs in Airbnb, here’s what you should do for the IPO. That’s awesome.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. That’s interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
And can you talk a little? So you said you were going through this process, and it really wasn’t great. But what was the turning point then? I mean, how did that eventually turn into attracting clients to the business?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. So despite my nervous breakdown, I was still blogging-

Julie Littlechild:
Once you [inaudible 00:23:03] with that.

Meg Bartelt:
Yes. I was still blogging regularly. I found some women in tech online organizations that I could participate in, so this whole idea of don’t try to dig your own pond, go to an existing pond where the fish are already swimming, so that’s what I did. I did not try to create any sort of group of women in tech that I could pitch my services to. I went to some groups that already existed and just tried to provide value. I did not try to pitch my services. If people had questions, I tried to answer them. One of these groups started offering webinars, and so I offered to provide webinars around financial issues. And so you do enough of that stuff consistently enough, for long enough, and about maybe 10 months in, I got the first prospect meeting request from someone whom I didn’t know, and had no social connection to me, because I don’t know if they’d read a blog, or seen me in Tech Ladies, or what. And that was the first glimmer of hope that this was actually going to work.

And I think from there, it really just built. And so maybe a year in is when I sort of turned and looked, turned to my husband and said, “You know what, this is going to work. I still can’t even pay our mortgage with what I’m not earning, but I can see that the trajectory is good.”

Steve Wershing:
So if you went back and did it all over again, what would you prioritize differently? And then it took you that 10 months to start, to get that first client that had no prior connection with you. But if you started with what you know today, what do you think is a ramp up time that a new advisor should plan on for starting to get introduced to people they don’t know?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. I don’t know if I could have done it any faster. The internet is big, and it takes time to have Google like you for SEO purposes. And it takes many times in front of someone in a virtual environment, many more times in a virtual environment than an in person environment for someone to actually reach out to you for any sort of help. So I don’t know if I could’ve done it any faster. Honestly, the first year of business, if I could’ve done anything differently, it simply would’ve been on the sort of emotional management side of things. I would’ve exercised more. I would’ve lowered my expectations. I don’t know. I would’ve met with my therapist more often or something. But I think I did all the right things. I had a really specific target market. And I was blogging and getting involved in groups where that target market lived. I think in retrospect, I’m very pleased that it honestly picked up as soon and as quickly as it did.

Steve Wershing:
Interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
Can we talk a little bit about the way you conduct virtual meetings? I know this is certainly a question that of course everybody’s asking now. But you were already well down this path. And what have you found works? How do you connect with clients? Do you do anything differently that you think is helpful for advisors to hear right now?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. I think if there were one message I would convey to advisors who are sort of new to the virtual firm thing, it would be reassurance on the front of client relationships. Now I can only speak from my experience working with people in the tech industry who are already accustomed to doing things online. But your client relationships do not have to suffer just because you’re seeing people through a screen. You can still be there for them, have an emotional connection, be silent, give them space. You can’t put your hand on their arm if they start to cry, but you can be quiet and allow them to have that emotion. And I say that because I think people fear a virtual relationship because it just strips out the humanity. It’s going to be purely transactional, and I just don’t find that.

You might have to be more attentive to what you as the advisor are doing in meetings, close down everything else so that you’re not sort of reflexively checking your Twitter account. I don’t obsess about whether I’m looking in the webcam, or in the screen, I actually just look at the client’s eyes through the screen. So to the client, it looks like I’m not looking directly at them, but I think there’s sort of the sense. They’re accustomed to that, so they know that I am. And so I really emphasize sort of almost a slow pace of my meetings, leaving plenty of time for clients to say what they want to say, have emotions, move through emotions. And I can’t really speak to it because I’ve never been a lead advisor at an in person practice, but it’s entirely possible to have this rich, fulfilling, meaningful relationship even when you’ve never met the person in person, there we go.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And that’s really interesting because I hear with some frequency that, that’s one of those reasons why some advisors don’t gravitate more toward the virtual experience because they feel like you just described. They feel like it’s not as complete or as full, so it’s interesting to hear that how you approach that in a way that helps make it that kind of a relationship. So we’d like to extend that then, and ask you, because we’re all about referrals here on the podcast. What has been your experience in attracting referrals? You’ve been at a couple brick and mortar RIAs before, and now you run a virtual RIA. And so what’s been your experience? And what do you think are some of the differences in referral behavior between the in person and the virtual?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. Well, I’m not particularly a metrics person. It’s sort of my achilles heel. But last time I checked, our referrals basically break down half and half between referrals from existing clients and content marketing. Either they Googled and found a blog post, or watched a webinar I ran, or something like that. So I honestly don’t know how being virtual directly affects referral possibilities, except for the fact that my clients in California can refer their coworker in New York easily to work with me. My clients already have a virtual relationship, so there’s no sense of geographic constraint when they have a coworker or a friend who also needs a financial planner.

But I think even more than the virtual, it’s just the focus target market that I have. Right? I mean, Steve, I read your book several years ago about stop asking for referrals. And one of the things, one of the big messages in there is you don’t have to ask for referrals if you are making your value so specific and so clear, that when your clients encounter someone else who has that problem, your name just naturally comes up as a sort of favor that the person’s doing their friend. And that’s actually where I think most of my referral mojo comes from, is just the specificity of the people we work with and the service we provide.

Julie Littlechild:
So do you do anything to actively encourage referrals? Or is it more an issue or sort of deliver great service, and your clients have delivered those?

Meg Bartelt:
I think in the past on occasion, in sort of the quarterly client newsletter, I’ve thanked clients for referring to me, and maybe that was sort of a tacit and keep on doing it. But no, at this point, and in fact for most of the last two years, I’d say we’ve had a wait list. So I don’t feel the need to really actively go out prospecting in any form. So I do think it is because of the value that we provide to a specific set of people that clients do it on their own without me having to be in their ear going, “Please, please, go refer me.”

Julie Littlechild:
Your content market must drive some of that, even if that’s not an intentional focus of it. I would hazard a guess that means you’ve got a lot of shareable content, and that makes it easy to refer.

Meg Bartelt:
Absolutely. I actually just had a prospective client email me yesterday. She used to work at Airbnb. Now she works at this other unicorn with a great equity comp package, but her friend, who is my client, referred her to me to prepare for the Airbnb IPO. And here, my last two blog posts are all about the Airbnb IPO. So if she did, I don’t know if she went to my website, but if she checked out my blog, she can certainly see that the thing she needs most help with is the thing I have most recently written about in depth on my blog.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Interesting. And just to highlight a couple things that you said, well, first I should say what you’re saying is, I would hope would be a ray of hope for many advisors because some advisors that I’ve worked with are really challenged by, they get referrals from the clients that they have, who come into their office. But when they then move out of town, and the relationship transitions to more virtual, they find themselves challenged to continue getting, because when they find that those clients don’t refer as much, or if at all. And it may just be because the relationship was established in a different mode than they’re currently doing it. And that by the same token, that should probably strike terror into a lot of other advisors because you’re communicating very clearly. And if you have a clear enough value for specific people, you’re not just competing with the people who are there in your town. You’re competing with everybody all over the place.

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. And I think some of this is very specific to the target market that we work with, women in their early to mid career in tech. They are geographically more mobile than your average bear. So I have several clients who since we’ve started working together absolutely have moved states. And I expect within the next five years, they might move again. That’s, A, not surprising in that community. People who work in tech are probably more mobile than average. And it simply doesn’t affect our planning relationship at all.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Right.

Meg Bartelt:
So it makes our relationships with our clients so … It just makes it so much smoother when transitions happen in the client’s life. Right? They can change pretty much anything, and our relationship doesn’t have to change.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. And so you mentioned too that you aren’t actively pursuing it necessarily, but you, for example in a client communication, mentioned that you really appreciate a couple of folks have referred you recently. And that’s actually a great way to talk about referrals because you’re just sort of reminding people that your good clients refer, and you really appreciate it when they do. Are there any other specific kinds of processes you have set up around referrals, around what you do when you receive one, or how you respond to them, anything like that?

Meg Bartelt:
Yeah. I will say I am more willing to vary from the process for referrals. If someone just comes to me sort of cold because they found a blog post, if there’s no room on my calendar for sort of free consultation until October, it is what it is. You’re just going to have to wait until October. But if a client refers you, I will probably find room in the calendar if it exists earlier than that. So I’ll roll out the red carpet a little more for referrals. But other than that, no. I would say I simply try across the firm to make everyone, be they prospective clients, or clients, just feel as comfortable and as welcome as possible. It’s just if you have some attachment or relationship to the firm already, you might get a little more wiggle room.

Steve Wershing:
Right. Interesting.

Julie Littlechild:
That’s some great ideas. Such an interesting business. I know people are just going to love to hear about the things that you’re doing. If advisors just want to see a bit more about your business and learn about you, where would they go, Meg?

Meg Bartelt:
Well, my website would be the best place. And that is flowfp.com, as in Flow Financial Planning. Flow as in water flow.

Julie Littlechild:
Got it, wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It’s been great getting to know you.

Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Thanks, Meg. This has been terrific.

Meg Bartelt:
Thank you.

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.