Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 420th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Michelle Underwood Gass. Michelle is the Founding Principal of Paradigm Advisors, an RIA based in Dallas, Texas, that oversees approximately $110 million in assets under management for 80 client households.
What’s unique about Michelle, though, is the way she created a structured meeting process to navigate around the places where new clients often get stuck, standardized their experience in navigating through her deep planning process… and still retained a way to ensure that each client’s financial plan focus and implementation is customized to their needs and prioritized for what they want to tackle first and foremost.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Michelle’s 5-part planning process, which starts with a “Get to Know You” meeting with prospects that includes some Life Planning exercises to both help Michelle understand what the client’s real issues are and help the client understand Michelle’s planning approach and whether a planning relationship would be a good fit, how Michelle begins onboarding new clients using a tech-enabled “Uncluttering” process that reduces friction in collecting and organizing clients’ documents and financial information, and how Michelle holds what she calls an “Intrinsic Discovery” meeting to go deeper and really get to the heart of the client’s values and goals.
We also talk about how Michelle then engages in a “Discovering Opportunities” process to highlight particular key planning opportunities for clients to pursue first (rather than just giving them a long list of recommendations) to avoid overwhelming her busy working-age client base and instead focus on the few issues that are most important to them, how Michelle leverages eMoney’s Decision Center tool during the plan implementation process to help clients see the impact of different planning options and potential recommendations that Michelle is making, and how Michelle’s firm uses workflow management software Hubly (which sits on top of her CRM) to ensure that planning tasks that require input from multiple firm stakeholders across the business are still completed efficiently.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Michelle discusses how she charges a flat planning fee alongside an AUM-based fee to be able to serve high-earning professionals who could benefit from Michelle’s comprehensive planning process but might not yet have sufficient assets to be served profitably based on an AUM fee alone, how Michelle crafted a pair of specialities to serve two different ideal target clients (busy working-age professionals and relatively older hedge fund veterans who she knew from her previous life running her own hedge fund), and what led Michelle to decide to start her own financial planning business after (temporarily) retiring herself from managing a hedge fund… and has since found an even deeper sense of purpose in helping her clients live their best possible lives.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about creating a structured meeting process to prevent new clients from getting ‘stuck’, how to use workflow management software to improve efficiency for tasks that require multiple stakeholders, or how to offer a planning offering and fee model that meets the needs of two different ideal client types, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, with Michelle Underwood Gass.