7 Pillars of Successful Networking for Financial Advisors

Best Practices January 12, 2023 at 10:41 AM Share & Print

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The latest episode of the Kitces.com podcast series features Lisa Brown, a partner and wealth advisor at CI Brightworth, offering advice about the pillars of professional networking and practice development that any successful financial advisor must know.

In addition to serving her own book, Brown’s role includes leading one of CI Brightworth’s four main practice areas: corporate professionals and executives. Given her success at the firm, Brown has begun to train and guide the next generation of advisors, both about how to serve their clients most effectively and about how to become effective business developers by identifying their own areas of interest and specialization.

As the podcast’s host, Michael Kitces, points out, there are more roles than ever for individuals interested in the advisory profession. According to Kitces, the growth of firms that assess fees based on assets under advisement rather than commissions has allowed leaders to open up new career opportunities for emerging professionals who may not have much experience or even interest in business development. He says these advisors can play a key role in the success of their firm by ensuring clients receive an excellent level of service.

However, as Kitces and Brown agree, at some point, from a career perspective, an advisor with leadership ambitions must figure out how to bring in new clients and grow the business. This is where the pillars of professional networking and client development become absolutely essential, Brown says.

See the slideshow for a summary of Brown’s tips for successful networking. Some of them resemble more universal professionals’ networking strategies while others are specific to the role of financial advisors, but all will be useful for advisors who want to participate more directly in the growth of their firm.

1. Be Open to Established Networking Groups

Early in her career, Brown joined a formal Business Networking International group, and she says up-and-coming advisory professionals should consider doing the same.

"That was a great way to start making key connections," Brown says. "I was going to networking breakfasts and dinners, just really trying to be out there in the community as much as possible and meeting people."

BNI and similar organizations bring together small groups of professionals with the goal of sharing ideas, business leads and referrals. In Brown’s group, she was the financial advisor, and there was also a real estate agent, a certified public accountant, a lawyer and various other professionals, including a property and casualty insurance agent and some small business owners.

"You meet regularly, and you're all responsible for helping one another grow your businesses and hopefully pass referrals back and forth," Brown explains. "I did well in that group. I was able to make good relationships with the individuals in that group and help grow my book."

(Image: Adobe Stock)

2. Be Mindful of the Referrals You Make

One thing Brown started to realize pretty quickly was that whoever one refers a client to is a reflection of oneself. Making a referral that works out swimmingly is one of the surefire ways to build credibility with clients, while sending them to the wrong professional does just the opposite.

"And so, you need to be careful about the referrals you are making, because if it doesn't work out, it can reflect poorly on you," Brown warns.

(Image: Shutterstock)

3. Embrace Your Niche

As Brown retells, Brightworth was started by two original leaders in the 1980s, Dave Polstra and Chris Dardaman. They targeted a clientele that was almost exclusively corporate executives of Fortune 500 companies — and in particular executives from Coca-Cola.

Over the years, the firm became known for this focus, such that most of its clients were corporate executives. The firm’s reputation built upon itself, Brown explains, and today one of the firm’s main four niches remains corporate executives.

"[Having this focus] really helps to drive your messaging much more clearly and find the clients you are looking to work for," Brown says. "Clients can see that you work with people like them, and your messaging is a little bit more targeted."

To ensure this niche remains vibrant, Brown explains, the firm puts a lot of effort into training its planners and younger advisors on the technicalities of working with corporate executives, and it puts out a significant amount of thought leadership content with this focus in mind.

(Image: Shutterstock)

4. Be a Public Presence

Beyond joining a professional networking group, Brown has also made it a point to join different local organizations during her career, for example the Atlanta Estate Planning Council. This was an effective way to meet potential clients, as well as CPAs and estate planning attorneys in her region.

"I have also done a decent amount of writing articles," Brown explains. "At one time, I was writing articles for our company newsletter that went out to thousands. So, I was getting my name associated with certain technical topics that I would write on and, eventually, I started getting some additional exposure by sending content to local newspapers."

Brown says it was an important career milestone to get her name in the Atlanta Business Chronicle, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and other local media publications.

"It's about the combination of getting yourself out in the community and leveraging content in the media to start building a personal brand — in addition to trying to serve the heck out of out of existing clients and keep them happy so they will tell their friends about you," Brown says.

(Image: Adobe Stock)

5. Be Most Useful at the Right Times

One unique feature of Brown’s experience in the advisory industry is that she has had the opportunity to be the lead advisor for her firm at Coca-Cola.

As Brown recalls, back in 2015, Coca-Cola went through a series of significant layoffs. While this was a difficult time for many senior Coke employees, it was also a time of transition and opportunity for them, and many wanted help planning their next steps.

"Coke produced a 140-page booklet on their severance packages and what employees needed to know," Brown recalls. "It was a good resource, but it was 140 pages. We were able to go in and boil it down to a digestible 10 pages, and this thing spread like crazy among Coke employees and executives. Our phone was ringing off the hook.”

Brown says other advisors can learn from this example. While it did take a significant amount of effort to boil down the severance information, in the end it provided substantial value to people at a difficult time.

"We got a lot of new clients through that effort," Brown says. "Not only at Coke, in fact. I had written some articles about it, and we were getting phone calls from other people at other companies going through a similar thing."

(Image: Adobe Stock)

6. Build on Existing Success

Under Brown’s leadership, CI Brightworth developed about 10 company-specific white papers that speak about building wealth at a given company where the firm already has a pool of clients, however small.

"So, we have specific white papers that speak about building your wealth at UPS, for example, or building your wealth at Google, Microsoft or Salesforce," she explains. "What we've done is taken companies where we have these pockets of clients, and we compile all the useful information we have on their compensation and benefits plans. These have been really powerful marketing tools."

If one of the firm’s advisors comes across a prospect working at one of these companies, it makes a big impression to be able to immediately deliver this information in a white paper format, Brown says.

"We have also done something similar for the corporate executive professional and actually written a book about building wealth," Brown adds. "It's called ‘Building Your Wealth Inside Corporate America,’ and it was published last year. So, now, when we meet with any corporate executive, we walk in with this book. That's our marketing piece."

(Image: Shutterstock)

7. Don’t be Afraid to Buck Expectations

"In our business, probably only 10% to 15% of advisors out there are women," Brown says. "I know it's a very small percentage, and we all know the statistics about more and more [women] who are going to be controlling more and more of the wealth in this country and around the world."

This is a great thing from a social perspective, Brown says, but that doesn’t mean her practice has to focus on women just because she is herself a woman.

"I have had male colleagues in the past make the assumption that I want to work with female clients or that, if they have a female prospect, that female prospect needs an advisor who is a woman," Brown says. "That has been frustrating to me because I feel like, at times, men have pigeonholed me as a woman as to the type of clients that I should be working with."

Brown’s personal experience has in fact been very different.

"Some of my favorite client relationships are with my male corporate executives," she explains. "I don't necessarily hold myself out there as the advisor for women to work with, intentionally. That's been a hurdle that I have had to overcome, and I’ve encourage younger women to make sure they don't find themselves in that position of getting pigeonholed if they don't want to be."

(Image: Adobe Stock)