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Brett Davidson is the Founder of FP Advance and the Uncover Your Business Potential program. He has worked closely with hundreds of financial planning firms in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands to make their businesses more fun, client-focused, and profitable. Brett writes regularly for some of the UK’s leading industry publications, including New Model Adviser, Adviser Business Review, and IFA Magazine, along with a successful blog of his own.

Takeaway Quote:

“Clients want to be working with someone who’s walking the talk.”

Show Timeline:

01:38 Background on Brett and FP Advance
The philosophy and mission of the company
04:28 Brett’s big leap
How Brett and his wife travelled for 15 months without losing any business
10:29 How advisors can start to design a more rewarding life/work schedule
Batching face-to-face work and leveraging technology
14:11 The implications of how you run your business on referrals
Being organized, and ‘walking the talk’, makes you more referable, even while being away
16:04 Why Brett first asks advisors about who they serve
The power of, and fears around, defining a niche
21:00 Organizing your business to support that target market
Getting down to the fundamentals of business planning and management
23:07 Designing a client experience that makes you referable from the start
Thinking about each client contact and how it can set you apart
26:31 The decision to work with a coach
Understanding the need for outside influence to make positive change
27:59 Recommendation for getting started in executing change
A book with simple strategies for developing critical skills within advisory teams
29:42 The role of the team
Ensuring you have the right team members to build the business you’re envisioning

Links:

Website: www.fpadvance.com  
Blog: http://www.fpadvance.com/blog/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/brettdavidson  
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/davidsonbrett
Facebook: www.facebook.com/FPAdvanceLtd
Courses: Uncover Your Business Potential, The Ultimate Guide to Managing Your Financial Planning Business

Want more?

Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog

Episode Transcript:

[Audio Length: 0:33:28]

Julie Littlechild:
Welcome to another episode of Becoming Referable, the podcast that helps you be the kind of adviser people can’t stop talking about. I’m Julie Littlechild, and on this week’s show, Steve and I speak with Brett Davidson.

Brett is based in London and is the founder of FP Advance, as well as the Uncover Your Business Potential Program. Through his work, he helps financial planning professionals advise better and live better, by growing more profitable businesses without losing their social purpose, or as he says, their soul. And for some perspective, Professional Adviser magazine rated him one of the top 50 most influential people in UK financial services three different times.

We talk to Brett about the business and what advisors need to do to build a business that can not only sustain growth but drive referrals. He talks about the specific tactics that you can put in place to achieve both. Now on a personal note, Brett has a great story. In 2015, he and his wife Debbie sold most of their possessions, rented out their home in London, and went traveling full-time, without their business skipping a beat. Love it! And with that, let’s get on with the show.

Brett, welcome to the podcast today. I’m so excited to talk to you. We’ve known each other for a lot of years, but I’m really excited to talk to you about the work that you’re doing with advisers, so welcome.

Brett Davidson:
Thank you very much. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Julie Littlechild:
Look, maybe what we could do just to orient our listeners is give, if you could give us a quick overview of your business. The work that you’re actually doing with advisers and maybe a little bit of the path that got you here today.

Brett Davidson:
Yeah, sure. I’m the founder of a company called FP Advance and also a program called the Uncover your Business Potential program. We work with financial planning professionals who are trying to grow and become more profitable, but to do that without losing their social purpose or their soul in the process. I’m an Australian, you might hear that in the accent, but I moved to the UK about 12 years ago. I’ve been an adviser in Australia for 14 years and we’ve been through that transition if you like from an old school sales oriented insurance business and transformed into a modern financial planning practice and done a reasonably good job at that. Moved to the UK and sort of found that they were going through that transition and so I set up my company to work with advisers who were client centric and trying to do it right and I’ve really been doing that ever since and the business has really just evolved over that 12 years into what it is today.

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