All too often, advisors and brokers leave wirehouses with the misguided belief that if they build an RIA, clients will come — even though they lack a sound strategy for building clientele.

Newly minted RIAs need business development strategies that avoid the cookie-cutter solutions that lead to mediocre growth. For rapid growth, they need well-defined strategies to develop, onboard and satisfy clients.

Consider whether these points apply to your practice:

• Market every day — not just when you have time. Don’t think of your firm as a financial firm that engages in marketing. Instead, think of it as a marketing company that provides financial advice. Many firms’ principals may feel they’re too busy to rejuvenate the lifeblood of their firms by taking the time to develop sales leads, and too broke to hire people to do this. But they can’t afford not to; it’s the best investment they can make.

• Build a network for professional referrals. If you’re a broker who has gone independent as a money manager, develop relationships and arrangements with financial planners who don’t act as money managers and are looking to place their clients’ money with managers. To do this, network hard — like the plane is going down (because without enough AUM growth, it may be). Attend professional conferences and work the room.

• Remember that success requires you to form a team around your practice. This team should consist of partners with whom you have what Charles Dickens called “suitability of mind and purpose.” Your firm’s team would include its partners, its referral network, any sub-advisors and your custodian. As a rule, if yours is a lean firm, you need a lean custodian to have a good fit. TD Ameritrade was a good fit for us when we started our firm, and we have stayed with them since. 

• Settle for less. Initially, that is, with the idea that less will soon become more. Too many advisors try to bring in all of their clients’ money. Advisors who think they have all of their clients’ assets are living in a fool’s world. You can distinguish yourself from the advisory herd by initially settling for a small slice of a client’s total investment dollar. Down the road, you can seek more assets.

• Give prospects the right reason to invest with you. A good reason is that you’re offering something they aren’t getting elsewhere — something that catches their attention and prompts them to say, “Tell me about that.” Chances are that when our business development people talk to a prospect, that individual is talking to other firms. So to get them in the door, they mention services that add something new to their existing portfolio. After our development people sign up new clients, we follow with two more touches in the next few weeks, one to make sure they know how to use the website and another to establish them with a client-experience person who gets to know them personally. Then they begin mining for other assets. Typically, the honeymoon period with a new client at any firm is the first six weeks, unless the market tanks. Now, while the market is up, put out your buckets while it’s raining. When the market’s down, relationships that you form with clients now can help you keep the back door closed.

• Don’t try to be all things to all people. Instead, narrow your focus to concentrating on the things you do best. If your prospects want other things, they can go elsewhere for them — until you become good at those things too.

• Develop strategic relationships. We have long-standing relationships with advisors who handle preferred stocks, options and alternative investments directly for their clients as their main enterprise; they act as sub-advisors for us. Events sponsored by your custodian are a great way to make these contacts. We met a sub-advisor several years ago at a TD Ameritrade holiday party who has handled options for us for several years.

• When choosing a custodian, remember: You’re the consumer now, not an employee. You can use the business you’d provide as leverage to find a custodian that meets your needs. People coming out of wirehouses are all too accustomed to getting short shrift from their own companies’ brokerage operations. When you become independent, you become the client, so act like it by interviewing prospective custodians to determine their potential level of commitment to helping you with day-to-day operational issues, containing costs, and most of all, growing your business. Make sure your custodian is interested in helping you, and not just interested in your assets.

• Don’t underestimate the financial grasp of your prospects or clients. Many advisors want clients with $1 million and up in assets, but they curiously underestimate these individuals’ ability to understand complex investments. This is a contradiction, because to get to this point, most of these people have had to pick up a fair amount of financial knowledge. And regardless of how much they know, there are far better ways to educate them than those used by most advisors. Typically, advisors try to impress people with how smart they are by inflicting endless data points on them, among other eye-glazing efforts to sign them. These abstractions are no way to create trust. Try taking investments out of this nerdy context and describe them using relatable metaphors. 

• Build your new-client ramp now. It’s a good idea to have onboarding capacity built out before you need it. If you put off doing this until you have a slew of prospects morphing into actual clients, it will be too late because you won’t be prepared to bring new clients aboard in a way that sustains their business and encourages them to increase investment. This move is contrary to bean-counter logic, but your firm’s growth will be hampered if you hold on to all of your beans.

Nobody ever said going independent was easy, but it holds rewards for advisors who market and develop clients with a well-defined strategy. By doing so, you stand a better chance of finding, signing and pleasing new clients, and thus growing your practice.

Dave Sheaff Gilreath and Ron Brock are the principals of Sheaff Brock Investment Advisors LLC, an equities management firm in Indianapolis that has HNW clients in 48 states. They started the firm with $60 million in assets 10 years ago after leaving Morgan Stanley. Today, the firm has AUM of about $1 billion, 10 business development people nationwide and six client-experience people.