When advisors hit the inevitable growth plateau after a few years in practice, sooner or later they realize they need to focus more of their efforts on attracting clients with a higher net worth. Unfortunately, many of the same advisors will continue to repeat too many of the same talking points. The marketing message that brought you middle-income clients may repel high-net-worth clients. Wealth management is a fundamentally different ballgame in the higher income brackets. Your challenge is learning to quickly show that you know how to solve complex tax issues.
1. Asset Allocation
Financial advisors are typically trained to handle a narrow set of approaches to investing, most of which have little value in the high income brackets. If your marketing materials contain a lot of talk about asset allocation, portfolio rebalancing, risk tolerance, investment horizon, or a handful of other generic keywords, you are putting out the message that you only know how to work with middle-income clients. You need to talk more about topics like real estate investments, capital gains strategy, estate strategy, business taxes, and alternative investment classes, just to name a few. Your message needs to lead with tax strategy.
2. 401(k) Plans
Any average advisor can set up and manage a 401(k) or any type of IRA. Conventional retirement plans don’t support the kind of strategies that a high-net-worth client needs. There’s a reason why I have been able to consistently cut a client’s tax bill by up to 48% annually. The concept is simple: only pay taxes each year on the money you spend that year, and pay taxes on your income during the years in which your tax bracket is lower. But there is no plug-and-play retirement product that will achieve this result for every client. Your marketing message needs to speak to your ability to engineer and customize a retirement strategy with multiple moving parts, bring in the right components at the right time, and manage the full process from A to Z.
3. Retirement Planning
Every financial advisor does retirement planning; that’s a given. If you talk about retirement in your marketing messages, you will sound the same as everyone else. As a financial advisor, it’s important to lead with a differentiator. If you are looking for high-net-worth clients, your marketing message should lead with tax strategy and quickly zero in on scenarios that require skill and sophistication. Make sure to highlight any relevant experience assisting clients who have money in real estate; real estate is where wealthy people make and keep their money. But here’s the key takeaway: retirement planning looks very different through the lens of a high-net-worth individual. Your marketing message needs to convey that you understand why.
4. Any Sentence That Contains “Ask Your CPA”
If your clients make $75,000 per year, you may never need to look at their tax returns or talk to their CPAs. But the complexity of executing tax strategy requires more direct collaboration between advisors and tax professionals. Siloing of professionals is a major source of frustration and expense for high-net-worth clients. You will add much more value to your clients when you work directly with their other peer professionals and help keep everyone on the same page. When you begin to adopt a more collaborative approach to client management, you will find that CPAs, attorneys, and other professionals begin to refer more of their clients to you.
I Am Here to Help
You may read the talking points that I shared above and feel uncertain as to how you would deliver on the ideas here. If so, I developed my business model to help advisors like you. I work step by step with advisors and show them exactly how to put together the tax strategies that will make an enormous difference for their clients. If you would like to learn more about how that works, click below to schedule a consultation.
About Heath
Heath Walters is a strategic tax planning specialist who partners with financial planners to provide behind-the-scenes tax planning expertise for the high-net-worth clients of financial planning firms. With over 20 years of experience as a CPA and Certified Tax Coach, Heath helps financial planning firms set themselves apart to ideal clients through coaching and specialized services that complement traditional wealth management solutions. Heath’s proven process for client acquisition has led to many advisors doubling their book of business in as little as 24 months. Heath has both a bachelor’s degree in accounting and Master of Science in Accounting from Appalachian State University. When he’s not helping financial planners reach their firm’s goals, you can find him spending time with his wife, Nancy, and their three children, Allie, Brianna, and Cooper, or fishing, grilling, and tackling home remodeling projects. He’s an avid Roll Tide fan as well. To learn more about Heath, connect with him on LinkedIn.
