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Danilo Kawasaki is the Co-Founder, Vice-President and COO of Gerber Kawasaki, where he oversees compliance and day-to-day operations.  His career accomplishments include tripling his previous branch’s revenue in three years, and turning it into the top office in the company. In 2018, Danilo was nominated by Investment News as one of the ”40 Under 40” top financial advisors and associated professionals.

Takeaway Quote:

“The old school way of thinking was referrals as a form of payment, but you’ve got to think of referrals as an exchange for value.”

“The old school way of thinking was referrals as a form of payment, but you’ve got to think of referrals as an exchange for value.”

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Show Timeline:  

2:01 Danilo provides an overview of the firm’s referral strategy
6:03 Defining a client referral
7:58 Insight into their specific referral techniques
12:55 Tracking referral data to get a clear sense of the success ratio
15:49 Seeing the potential in a client relationship that may not be highly profitable early on
19:18 Discussing their advice model
23:03 The significance of social media in driving the overall growth of the firm
25:17 Their approach to organizing a variety of client communications  
27:38 Client planning practices and review meetings
31:46 Training advisors to consistently uphold the firm standards and service plan    
33:23 Creating efficiency through technology to meet the demands of the future

Links:

Website: https://gerberkawasaki.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danilokawasaki/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/danilokawasaki

Want more?

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

Episode Transcript:

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 Danilo Kawasaki, cofounder, Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of Gerber Kawasaki, a wealth management firm in Santa Monica, California. Born of Brazilian and Japanese parents, Danilo came to the US at age 17, shortly before enrolling in college. After graduating, he joined SunAmerica Securities in 2002, rising to branch manager by age 24.

In 2010, he formed Gerber Kawasaki with partner Ross Gerber. The firm now has 14 advisors working with over 6,000 families and managing over $650 million in assets. In 2018, Danilo was named to the Investment News 40 Under 40 list of young, top advisors. Gerber Kawasaki is really focused on getting referrals, and our conversation is dense with strategies and tactics. In our study of referrals, Julie and I found that firms with a formal referral marketing system were associated with higher levels of referrals, and Gerber Kawasaki is a great example. When I asked about it, Danilo could access referrals by week with a few mouse clicks, giving him the ability to report an average of over 120 referrals across their 14 advisors per week.

We’ll talk about their willingness to take promising prospects without much in assets to manage, even though they use an assets under management revenue model. Stay tuned till the end, where Kawasaki tells us that one of their firm’s differentiators is that clients get an advisor who actually works. There’s a lot we cover in our conversation. I hope you enjoy our conversation with Danilo Kawasaki.

Danilo Kawasaki, welcome to the Becoming Referable podcast. We’re so happy to have you.

Danilo:
Thanks for having me.

Steve:
I just want to jump into this. You and I were speaking a while ago and we were talking a little bit about the referrals that your firm gets. I wanted to lead with this. I asked you about how many referrals the company gets, and you popped right up there with a number of 120 a week. Two things really impressed me about that. First, it’s a really big number, and the other thing is that you had it so easily accessible. Let’s start there. Your firm, Gerber Kawasaki, gets about 120 referrals a week. Give us a little background on where that comes from and how that happens.

Danilo:
Yeah, sure. I think it’s important to highlight we have 14 full-time advisors, so that number is the efforts of the 14 advisors we have who are seeing clients all week long. Part of my job as the Chief Operating Officer is to track our numbers and make sure that we have always a full pipeline of referrals. I have a system that I’ve used for years to track referrals, also to track what happens to those referrals. Of the calls that they make, how many of those referrals turn into appointments, how many of those appointments ultimately turn into clients.

It’s basically 16 years of data to reach the numbers that we have. Referrals have evolved since I started in this business 16 years ago in many ways, and we can talk about that too. To answer your question, about 120 referrals on average, 14 advisors seeing clients full time. That’s kind of an average week.

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