Heather Fortner on Establishing Communities of Clients

Show Timeline:    

3:28 How SignatureFD manages a diverse client base
Their niche approach to servicing a large number of clients
6:59 Why they prefer to use the terms ‘community’ and ‘initiative’
The 80/20 strategy as it applies to financial design and communities
9:48 How clients can belong to more than one community
Giving clients the ability to connect across multiple communities
12:30 The consistency of the planning experience
And the firm’s overall target client
15:14 Creating different client experiences for different communities
Events and education to address their unique concerns
18:15 The role of client advisory boards
The important insights they’ve gained, and how they position the invitation to the board
24:53 Driving growth with a unique marketing strategy
Connecting marketing to individual communities rather than the firm as a whole
30:42 Defining core values
The specific things that attract advisors to work with SignatureFD
37:08 Driving referrals
And the firm’s outlook for the future

Links:

Website: www.signaturefd.com
Blog: www.signaturefd.com/resources/blog/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/HeatherRFortner
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherfortner/
Advisory Board program: napfa.advisoryboard.solutions

Want more?

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

Episode Transcript:

Speaker 1:    
Learn everything you need to know to form and benefit from a successful client advisory board from the man who has led more client advisory board meetings than anyone in the financial services industry. Steven Wershing, CFP, has been helping financial advisory firms create and utilize client advisory boards as a business building strategy for over seven years. And now you can get his best advice for a small fraction of the cost by attending this one-day program held just before the NAPFA 2018 Conference on October 15th in Philadelphia. By the end of this one day program you will have a complete and thoughtful plan to make your client advisory board a reality or make a bigger success of the one you already have.

What you’ll learn includes how to choose the right participants for your board, creating an effective board meeting agenda, choosing a venue, what restaurants won’t tell you, choosing the right person to run your meetings and upgrading the client experience with your board’s guidance. The program also includes guest speaker Marie Swift, President and CEO of Impact Communications, a thought leader for thought leaders. She is known for bringing some of the industry’s best and brightest voices together for dialogue and debate. She’ll teach you how to leverage your advisory board and your marketing. You’ll walk out with a complete action plan for getting your advisory board together or to make your current board a bigger success. Go to napfa.advisoryboard.solutions. One day, October 15th in Philadelphia, can show you how to deepen your client relationships and engage them like never before. Having a conversation with some of your best clients may be the fastest way to referrals and more clients. Don’t miss this opportunity. Go to napfa.advisoryboard.solutions to sign up for this event today. That’s napfa.advisoryboard.solutions. Now, Becoming Referable.

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. In this episode we talk with Heather Robertson Fortner, Chief Compliance Officer and Chief Operating Officer of SignatureFD in Atlanta. The firm manages over 4 billion dollars for more than 1800 clients and was awarded the Charles Schwab Best in Business Impact Award in 2016. When you have grown to as many advisors as they have, some through acquisition, it’s hard to maintain a focus on a single target market. SignatureFD has met the challenge of multiple constituencies with a unique strategy. They’ve developed client initiatives. These groups, which are in addition to the firm’s advisory services, offer client experiences tailored to the particular client groups including senior partners of law firms, corporate executives and physicians. They find that they can attract referrals through these initiatives as well as for the underlying wealth management services. Heather walks us through the development of these initiatives, how they grew and what they mean to the firm’s growth. She describes the role of the initiatives in the firm’s marketing and the future she sees for these groups as well as the firm overall. They’re an impressive firm with an innovative approach to a common marketing problem. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Heather Robertson Fortner.

So Heather Fortner, welcome to The Becoming Referable podcast, it’s so good of you to join us.

Heather Fortner:   
Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Steve Wershing:   
We’ll talk a little bit about where SignatureFD came from in a minute but I just want to start out with the interesting thing that we want to talk about most today which is that you have a series of initiatives that you’ve created around different groups of your clients. Can you tell us a little bit about that idea and where that came from?

Heather Fortner:     
Sure, absolutely. It was, I would say, really the collision of two things that happened in the business over time. And one of those was the fact that we had advisors who either were already with our firm and their books had evolved over time or they had joined our firm with books of business that were already pretty homogenous around a particular community of clients. But really these advisors ended up with a passion around serving a particular niche of clients. That collision really hit our vision when we were doing a lot of planning and work and thought around what is it that we really want to do long term. What do we want to be when we grow up?

And we had a very clear vision of we want to enhance the lives of 10,000 families. At the end of the day we want to be 10x. What drives us as a firm, what drives us as people is the impact that we can have on people’s lives. And what we saw was really a collision of those two things where we knew we wanted to be 10x and we knew that we wanted to serve clients well and we had a group of advisors who were extremely passionate about very specific groups of clientele. And those two things really started to come together into a space where we were just curious about what could happen and how it could happen and out of that I will say that I think the idea of community was born and out of that has come a really interesting differentiator and quite frankly a platform to serve a lot of different clients extremely well.

Steve Wershing:      
Now we should really set this up for the listeners because they may not know who SignatureFD is but how many advisors do you have?

Heather Fortner:        
So right now we’re at about 20.

Steve Wershing:  
Yeah. So you’re a pretty big firm. And so you’ve got clients that are from all kinds of target markets and have all kinds of needs and those kinds of things and so you’ve set up these sort of, almost special interest groups within the firm. And can you list off for us where you stand? What are the initiatives that you have now?

Heather Fortner:    
Sure, absolutely. So we’ve got Signature Exec which service executives in companies. We’ve got Signature Generosity which really goes across all of our client base but really is focused on philanthropic and transformational giving. Signature Health, Signature Law, Signature Women, Signature Entrepreneur and Signature Pro which services professional athletes and entertainers.

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