Welcome again to the 372nd episode of the Monetary Advisor Success Podcast!
My visitor on at present’s podcast is Melody Townsend. Melody is the president of Townsend Monetary Planning, an RIA based mostly in Lexington, KY, that oversees $112 million in property below administration for 160 shopper households.
What’s distinctive about Melody, although, is how after her first decade in apply, she quadrupled her income within the subsequent 2 years by restructuring her enterprise mannequin from standalone hourly engagements and undertaking planning charges to a extra holistic wealth administration providing that mixed funding administration and monetary planning for a single AUM payment… which each higher mirrored the total worth she was offering shoppers, and enabled her to actually scale her agency and rent up so it was not solely depending on her alone.
On this episode, we speak in-depth about how though Melody initially constructed an hourly, fee-only agency for its capability to serve the center market in Kentucky the place she was based mostly, she discovered that whereas it offered lots of flexibility, there have been limitations to the expansion and scalability the mannequin supplied while you’re additionally chargeable for the entire back-office duties along with attempting to generate sufficient billable hours, how Melody additionally realized that the hourly mannequin had led her to undercharge by not billing for all the time she was spending servicing shoppers and determined to take a giant leap to right-size her costs by wrapping them into an AUM payment for these shoppers she was serving to with implementation, and the way Melody discovered regardless of her fears about shedding shoppers within the face of a payment change that might on common double her shopper charges, in apply even her shoppers knew that she was undercharging, to the purpose that just about each single one stayed and plenty of even consolidated extra property with Melody as soon as she was really capable of handle (and invoice on) them.
We additionally speak about how Melody invested early, at the very least relative to her income and income, in enterprise coaches and her personal staff as a way to maintain the service mannequin that might meet her personal requirements, why Melody determined to rent with a deal with character over technical expertise, reasoning that whereas she may educate paraplanning work, she could not educate integrity and work ethic, and now has a number of house-trained CFPs working in her agency, and the way Melody leveraged the shortage of Licensed Monetary Planner professionals out there in Kentucky as a technique of her personal branding and let organizations like NAPFA and FeeOnlyNetwork ship potential shoppers to her door, moderately than spending time in gross sales that she did not take pleasure in anyway.
And make sure to take heed to the tip, the place Melody shares how she struggled initially with delegating as a result of it was laborious for her to articulate in phrases what he simply ‘knew’ in her personal mind about how shoppers must be served, how as Melody has grown her income and employed extra individuals, the e-book “Lead From Any Seat” which advocates that groups deal with the boss as a ‘buyer’ of the staff each reworked how she formed her communication together with her crew for the higher, and empowered her staff to take full accountability for his or her work, and the way Melody’s profession and enterprise selections got here not as a gentle path of progress however a collection of epiphanies about her personal value and worth led her down new avenues that she had by no means envisioned when first embarking on entrepreneurship as a 20-something advisor practically 20 years in the past.
So whether or not you are concerned about listening to about how Melody calculated her project-based work to make it 1 dimension suits all (and shortened her onboarding course of within the meantime), how Melody remained relentlessly centered on discovering her ultimate shoppers, even within the early years, and the way Melody makes use of her agency’s core values to filter by means of each her strategic enterprise and team-building selections, then we hope you take pleasure in this episode of the Monetary Advisor Success Podcast.
