7 Pillars of Successful Networking for Advisors

Best Practices March 09, 2026 at 11:48 PM

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.

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)

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)

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)

John Manganaro

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