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Andrea Schlapia is the Founder and CEO of Ironstone, a firm that helps financial advisors enhance their strategic planning process, business development efforts and operational efficiency.

Our conversation includes:

  • The Fundamental 4: a blueprint to create extraordinary business
  • The team challenges that advisors and firms face
  • Setting your team up for success while working from home
  • The steps to structuring your team effectively
  • The link between operational effectiveness, client engagement and referrals
  • How to recruit, attract and support next gen team members
  • Coach vs. boss: how advisors can provide better coaching and mentoring

Andrea began her career in banking, rising through the ranks of global investment firms like Dreyfus, Deutsche Bank and Prudential before launching Ironstone in 2008. She’s an educator, speaker and coach.

Take away quote:

“The human element piece is the Achilles heel for so many business owners… How to hire, when to hire, how much to pay? What’s the structure that I’m trying to implement? It all ties back to strategic planning.”

Links:

Website:                         https://ironstonehq.com/
Twitter:                          https://twitter.com/AndreaSchlapia
LinkedIn:                       https://www.linkedin.com/in/aschlapia/
Ironstone Overview:   http://www.becomingreferable.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Ironstone-Introduction.pdf

Want more?
Stephen Wershing: http://advisorchecklist.com/blog/
Julie Littlechild: http://www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

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Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you become the kind of advisor people can’t help talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I are joined by Andrea Schlapia. Now, Andrea is the founder and CEO of Ironstone, a firm that helps financial advisors maximize their focus on strategic planning, business development, and operations. She’s an educator, a speaker, a coach, and she’s a great interview.

Julie Littlechild:
In our conversation, Andrea breaks down, what she calls, the Fundamental 4. A blueprint that she created to guide advisors through the process of creating extraordinary businesses. And she digs in on the biggest challenges that she sees among advisors.

Julie Littlechild:
Andrea talks about the shifts that have been created by the pandemic, and the real impact of missing human connection. She shares great ideas on how to structure an effective team, and both attract and support next generation team members. And, of course, we’ll look at how all of this connects to referrals. And with that, let’s get straight to our conversation with Andrea.

Julie Littlechild:
Well, Andrea, welcome to the podcast. Happy to have you here.

Andrea Schlapia:
Thank you, Julie. It is great to be here. And I know we’ve been in each other’s circles for many years, so it’s nice to finally have a conversation and collaboration.

Julie Littlechild:
I know. One of the great things about this podcast is just getting the chance to actually just talk in a dedicated way to people about what they’re doing, and yeah, this is a long time coming. So, I’m thrilled you’re here.

Julie Littlechild:
We’ve talked before this, and I’ve been reading a lot of your stuff, which is great, and we’re going to link to some of your materials in the show notes. But one of the things I noticed in the way that you articulate sort of is models, or frameworks for advisors. And I always find it really helpful because there’s so much we can do, but it’s hard to know where to start and what we need to do. And so, I know you referred to the Fundamental 4. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means?

Andrea Schlapia:
Absolutely. So, the Fundamental 4 is inclusive of strategic planning, business development, operational effectiveness, and the human element.

Julie Littlechild:
Okay.

Andrea Schlapia:
And we’ve created eight subcategories underneath each of those four fundamentals that we help a business owner/practice team really evaluate how they’re running the business. So, some things that are under strategic planning, of course, is compensation, is succession planning, is what business model you are in or where you want to go. Business development is everything of how are you growing the business? What’s the client experience, that referral network, which we’re talking about how to be referable.

Andrea Schlapia:
Operational effectiveness is all the standard operating procedures and your client segmentation, your service metrics, your new client onboarding. Really, how are you running the practice? What are your SOPs? And then, the human element, of course, is all about the people on the bus. What is the role? What’s the responsibility? What’s the career path, communication, leadership, culture, all of those things. So, it’s a really nice framework to take a look at your business and to say, “What’s a out of whack? What’s not? What do we need to refine? What can we change, alter, and elevate?” But it gives you, in this nice little box to take a look, at all the different ways to slice and dice.