Ric Edelman in no uncertain terms lambasted Wall Street and most financial advisors for focusing on the rich, which he says is no way to grow an advisory firm that delivers services America needs.

Edelman, chairman and CEO of registered investment advisor Edelman Financial Services, delivered his pointed message this week to about 300 attendees at the 3rd Annual Financial Advisor Retirement Symposium in Weston, Fla. The conference is produced by Financial Advisor and Private Wealth magazines. The Edelman Financial Group, based in Virginia, has 17,000 clients, 30 offices nationwide and nearly $8 billion in assets under management and expects $110 million in revenue this year. The firm has gone through a number of business transitions: It was bought in 2005 by Sanders Morris Harris, went private in 2009, went public in 2011 and last month announced it's going private again in a transaction valued at about $260 million, or $8.85 a share. Edelman said he expects the most recent transaction won't be the last.

"This is counter intuitive for most of Wall Street. Everybody in the financial services sector spends all of their time trying to cater to the high net worth, some of them beyond that go into the family office environment. We believe in just the opposite. We believe in serving the mass affluent. Nobody else seems to be paying attention to that. Everybody considers it too pedestrian to serve people with a lousy hundred grand," said Edelman.

Edelman noted that it was reported in December that some Merrill Lynch advisors won't get paid on new accounts that total less than $250,000. "It's really astonishing," Edelman said. "They basically said to the 99 percent of America we don't want to talk to you, we don't want to serve you. And everybody wonders on Wall Street why America hates us."

But it wasn't just Wall Street brokers Edelman criticized. "How many consultants in our field, how many articles in Financial Advisor magazine and all the other publications have you seen written by those consultants and coaches and experts who say you should take your clients on an annual basis, rank them A, B, C, and fire the Cs to make more room for the As?"

"Our industry is focused and fixated on attracting and serving the high-net-worth client," he noted. "Guess what? There are only so many millionaires in this country. And guess what? You are all chasing them. Go right ahead, leave the guy with a hundred grand to me. I'm perfectly content to be the only guy in America serving that person."

He praised advisors who attended the conference for wanting to expand their skills and learn more about what they can do to build their practices. Edelman offered insight on how his firm has grown since he founded it 25 years ago and how advisors might grow their own businesses.

Freely sharing advice with the public in as many forums as possible is key, he said, because advisors need to express clearly how their firms can serve clients. Edelman has identified 25 things advisors should be doing to grow their businesses but most don't do any of them, he maintained. They include participating in radio and television shows; publishing books, newsletters, white papers and other reports; having a robust Web site; and giving seminars to consumers.

There are two different approaches, in a nutshell, to growing a practice. "You can either be Martha Stewart or you can be Frank Perdue. Frank will sell you a chicken. Martha will teach you how to cook a chicken.

"You need to decide which of the two you want to be," Edelman said. "Most of the financial services sector acts like Frank. They are selling their services to the public. I never engage in that and never have in 25 years and never will. Instead we act like Martha Stewart: We teach people how to cook chickens. We take our advice and we share it with consumers, freely, openly, repeatedly. ... We hope that a few of them will say, 'I don't want to do it on my own. I need to hire someone.'"

A criticism Edelman has heard over and over is that he's successful because he's a great marketer. "If that's all I was, I wouldn't exist. Because marketing only gets you to try a product once," Edelman said. "After that, the experience of the product is going to determine whether you become a repeat buyer. The greatest marketing in the world cannot save a horrible product."

He also gave his opinion on many advisors' emphasis on growing their business by getting referrals. "Everyone says the way to do it is through referrals, but that's not a way to build a firm to any substantial degree," Edelman maintained. "You're going to add a handful of clients a year and maybe grow 5 percent in your practice."

Edelman said his firm provides financial planning, college planning, retirement planning and estate planning to clients, with a heavy emphasis on retirement planning. "We believe providing investments to a client without providing financial planning is an unsustainable, unsupportable, unjustifiable business model," Edelman said. "It's the equivalent of physicians prescribing drugs without doing the diagnosis."

To help clients achieve their goals, Edelman Financial has created more than 100 different portfolio models, each of which are based on Modern Portfolio Theory, are philosophically the same and include 19 asset classes and market sectors using institutional funds and ETFs.

A portfolio using these funds is constructed for clients with as little as $50,000 in household assets; individual accounts in the household can have as little as $3,000, he said. Later this summer, he added, Edelman Financial is going to introduce a new version of this program that lowers the household minimum to $5,000. The average account size at Edelman is $450,000 and the firm has 1,200 clients with more than $1 million in AUM, although the firm doesn't actively recruit high-net-worth clients, he noted.

Most important in everything the firm does is to do it consistently. "What we are doing is adopting a Starbucks and McDonald's model. What we are doing is recognizing that if you can go to any Starbucks in the country, that coffee is identical. You go to any McDonald's in the world, that burger is the same, sadly," he said, as the audience chuckled.

That means all of Edelman's advisors have the same attitudes when it comes to financial planning topics and they say the same things to clients. "Everyone injects their own personality, perspective and experiences, but the message is always going to be consistent," he said. Edelman Financial has a high ratio of support personnel to advisors-300 staff members plus 80 financial advisors. Edelman says his advisors are well paid, have at least 10 years of experienced when they are hired and do only financial planning. They aren't unjamming copy machines or worrying about other operational problems so they have more time to handle more clients, he said.

Some advisors in the audience wanted to know how Edelman makes money on clients with only $100,000 in assets. "The fee schedule we charge with the guy with a hundred grand is 2 percent," Edelman said. "How much are you charging the guy with a million? I'll bet it's only 1 percent. So give me 10 guys at a hundred grand and I'll be making twice as much money as you are with the one guy with a million."

Edelman maintained clients with only $100,000 have far less complicated financial planning needs than those with a million in assets, so servicing them takes less time. "And since none of you are willing to serve them, when I do serve them guess what their loyalty is to me? They are thrilled to death, because I lavish the attention on that person that you won't," he said.

He also encouraged advisors to increase the amount of pro bono work they do. He says his firm doesn't turn away people with few assets but helps them with problems like credit card debt, homes under water and more.

"So can I make money on the guy with only five grand? I don't know and I don't care," he asserted. "There are millions of Americans who need our help. How dare we not provide the services they need? Instead of trying to help people stay rich, how about trying to help people get rich in the first place?"

-Dorothy Hinchcliff