Stephanie Bogan on the Value of Authenticity

Links:

Website:   https://limitlessfa.life/
Twitter:     https://twitter.com/Steph_Bogan
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/sbogan/

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, a 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 the wonderful Stephanie Bogan. So buckle up, it’s time to get inspired. Now, Stephanie is the founder of Limitless, a company that helps advisors grow and achieve great success but on their own terms. She has consulted with and coached top firms and executive leaders and is a true thought leader in our industry.

Julie Littlechild:
Stephanie takes on the challenge in this episode of defining your value. She breaks things down into three distinct types of value and looks at how to communicate each. We also talk about the importance of mastering your own mindset and the impact all of this can have on your referral strategy. And finally, we explore the mistakes that advisors make when it comes to referrals and the actionable ways to create a culture to become more referable. And with that, let’s get straight to our conversation with Stephanie. Well, Stephanie, welcome to the podcast. So good to have you here.

Stephen Wershing:
Welcome Stephanie.

Stephanie Bogan:
Thank you. It is always a pleasure to hang with the two of you and have really fun conversations.

Julie Littlechild:
You’re one of these people where I can’t believe we’ve not really had you on yet.

Stephen Wershing:
I know. How did we-

Julie Littlechild:
How did we-

Stephen Wershing:
How did we get this far without having her on.

Julie Littlechild:
I know, I know.

Stephanie Bogan:
I did hide in Costa Rica for 7 years.

Julie Littlechild:
That is true. Steph’s strategy of just hiding in other countries apparently is not working any longer.

Stephen Wershing:
But it only worked so long we tracked you down.

Julie Littlechild:
We tracked you down. So we have so many questions for you, but could you maybe just start with an update on the work that you’re doing just to bring everybody up to speed?

Stephanie Bogan:
Yeah. Well I think most people are marginally familiar with the idea that I unretired, at least part-time, I work about 25 hours a week now, I unretired. So I joked for a long time that right working with purpose on my terms was 25 hours a week from the beach in Costa Rica. We’re now post COVID splitting our time between Park City. We just bought a house here in Costa Rica. But the work has really been focused on for the last few years, one what we call the Limitless Advisor Coaching Program, which is really just my way of taking all the best of what I’ve learned and working with some of the top firms in this space for the last what, 25, 27 years, and really wanting to make that same kind of knowledge available with the twist of, to me, what I learned in retirement was that true success comes with the freedom to enjoy it.

Stephanie Bogan:
And I had been really successful. I had been on the cover of the magazines and sold my business and I had done all these great things. But I was like the princess and the pea, I just couldn’t quite enjoy it. And so I really learned that for me success was a form of striving and significance. And so when I retired, it was just me on the beach with… I always joke that success is a very convincing disguise especially to the people wearing it. So it was just me and I was just a nobody on the beach in Costa Rica living my life and being happy.

Stephanie Bogan:
And when I unretired, Bob Barris had called up and basically blame Bob in all cases just blame Bob Harris. For a very short version of that story because I know we have time limits. But I unretired because I wanted to take the best of what I knew from a business perspective, but I unequivocally wanted to deliver it in the wrapper of success that comes on your terms, right? The time and the freedom to enjoy it and live what I call to build a wildly successful business and a life that you love.

Stephanie Bogan:
And so Limitless Coaching was really formed out of that. So the general premise is how do solo and smaller firms build that million dollar practice? We call it take a hundred days off, it could be 30 hour work weeks. We’ve got clients that would literally work half the year with a very small select client base. And then we literally have firms that I think a third of the population is over a million in revenue but they want to simplify and they want a more satisfying kind of success. So it’s all those best practices of practice management, operations and marketing but a lot of it is focused on…

Stephanie Bogan:
I basically distill what I do now into four basic swim lanes, which is mindset strategy like where am I going, why am I going there? So I work with leaders, CEOs, and founders of finserv and fintech firms. We worked with Carson, some other big firms around strategy, particularly advisor initiatives, client experience, right? Very similar to the advice stuff that I’ve done and platforms that I’ve built out in the past. And I just love that work in terms of what I call scaling special and driving real efficacy and adoption, which larger firms tend to have a hard time with.