Herbers, Luke Rebrand as Kaleido

“Advisors are innovative,” says Angie Herbers, but many of those innovative ideas “never come to life because they’re not based on a solid foundation.”

At Herbers’ renamed firm, Kaleido Inc., advisors will get all the practice management help (excepting compliance) they need to build that foundation, Herbers said in an interview about Kaleido and its business plan.

The San Diego-based company was formed last year through the merger of Herbers’ Angie Herbers Inc. and Kristen Luke’s Wealth Management Marketing (Disclosure: Herbers has long written for Investment Advisor and ThinkAdvisor).

So what does the name mean? Herbers explains that many advisors find themselves facing roadblocks to the growth of their firms, and while advisors tend to be “good at identifying” the problem, they’re “bad at coming to a solution” and instead tend to “go down the wrong paths and get frustrated” with their efforts to solve their growth problems. That’s because, she says, “how you run a $1 million firm is totally different than how you run a $10 million firm.”

Using a free software tool called the Kaleido Scope, advisors can perform a self-assessment of their business that gives them a graphic perspective, resembling a kaleidoscope, that clearly shows in a color-coded way which issues they need to work on to achieve their growth goals.

The Kaleido Scope asks a number of questions to identify where a firm is and where it needs to be. “Do you have a vision statement that’s memorized? Do you have motivated people? Do you have a formal exit strategy? These are all questions we’ve asked our clients in the past,” Herbers says, referring to her firm and Luke’s. “Kaleido Scope tells you what the solutions are,” based on data from the years of consulting work that Herbers and Luke have done for advisory firms.