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.