Joe Messinger on What College Planning Can Tell Us About Developing a Niche

Show Timeline:

1:33 How Joe came to work with his specific market
Understanding a need in the marketplace and making a proactive decision to meet it
4:17 How committing to this niche has helped the firm drive referrals
How people naturally and consistently refer them without being asked
8:01 Why Joe no longer positions himself as a ‘financial advisor’
Paying attention to the conversations your ideal clients have, and how they want to introduce you
10:52 Evaluating if a given niche is right for you
And connecting with partners to help them refer you to the right clients
13:57 Capstone’s discovery process
How they help prospects understand what makes the firm different
16:37 How their thinking about their ideal clients and the service they provide has evolved
And how this has led them to ‘productize’ the planning process
20:39 What Joe means by helping people pay for college vs. save for college
The strategy involved in filling the gap
24:10 The one-to-many approach
Joe’s webinar strategy for prospecting
26:07 How the niche informs and influences the rest of the business
Designing the office environment and team to support the target market
28:23 Understanding the specific emotions of your target clients
The conversations Capstone advisors have to connect at a deeper level with their clients
31:52 The firm’s referral strategy
Why they don’t see the need to do more than they are already doing
33:28 Joe’s recommendations for advisors thinking about a niche
The questions to ask to intentionally design your success

Links:

Websites: www.Capstonecollegepartners.com, www.capstonewealthpartners.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joemessinger/

Want more?

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

Episode Transcript:

Steve:                
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. Our guest today is Joe Messinger, CFP, CHFC, CLU, and co-founder and director of college planning for Capstone Wealth Partners. Joe’s target market is families with college bound teenagers. Specifically, Joe helps families who cannot qualify for needs-based aid figure out how they will pay for their kid’s education as part of a comprehensive financial planning engagement. Toward that end, Joe is recognized nationally as an expert in college funding strategies and actually trains other advisors on how to become experts themselves. Our conversation is dense with great ideas and advice on developing a niche, whether or not it happens to be related to college funding. We talk about the importance of defining your target market using characteristics your clients will recognize among their friends. We talk about what makes for effective resources you can offer to attract referrals.

He describes how to develop strategic partners who will refer you and how to become the one at the party people want to meet. Here’s a hint, it’s not by calling yourself a financial advisor. Be sure to stay through to the end where Joe describes the importance of being passionate about the niche you choose, how that can propel you to be even more compelling, and attract more clients and referrals. So, without further delay here’s our conversation with Joe Messinger. So, Joe Messinger, welcome to The Becoming Referable podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Joe:         
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Excited to do it.

Steve:     
So, you’re an expert in the college planning area of financial planning. What kinds of things distinguish an advisor who’s an expert at that versus somebody who’s not?

Joe:           
I think for us we really would say we are college planning but it’s really the college funding. I think most advisors know how to save for college. We’re really focused on how to help families actually pay for college, which I think is kind of the missing piece that a lot of advisors maybe don’t have a ton of knowledge or education on. A lot of times it’s not their fault. It’s really not part of the curriculum that we go through getting into the business.

Steve:        
Okay.

Julie:       
We’re going to ask you a lot about the details of this but I’d love to know why you went down this path and really built expertise in this area?

Joe:        
Yeah. It’s kind of an interesting story of how we got here. My background for about eight or nine years was with some large firms, large broker dealers before, then were looking to go independent and serve folks in this space. I was an advisor for almost ten years. I started getting questions from my friends as I was in my early 30s that were graduating from MBA school, doctors, dentists, those types that had significant amounts of student loan debt. They came to me and said, “Hey. You’re a financial advisor. Help me with this.” I said, “I have no idea how to handle this.” I would ask around, ask CPAs, other top advisors that I had talked to in our firms and really nobody had any solutions. The other piece to that was I realized that for those folks it’s 100 percent reactive. There was no proactive approach to how to figure out a reasonable student loan amount or how to actually pay for college before they signed up.

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