Forbes magazine places the number of billionaires at 2,208. Meanwhile, the consulting firm Wealth-X calculates there are 2,754 billionaires in the world today. While it is impossible to accurately determine all the holders of enormous wealth, as many favor obscurity, there are probably a good few thousand families at this wealth level.

For professionals—wealth managers, lawyers, accountants, and so forth—who are motivated to work with the wealthiest of the wealthy, conceptually, the methodology for delivering their services and products to billionaires and other ultra-affluent families is a fairly straightforward three-step process:

Step 1: Become a Thought Leader

Step 2: Build Strategic Partnerships

Step 3: Provide Your Products and Services to Billionaires

The complication is effectively implementing this process. When the process is implemented well, the results can be fantastic. Let us now take a closer look at sourcing billionaires—Steps 1 and 2.

Become a Thought Leader

Billionaires—and everyone else for that matter—want to work with the most capable experts possible. While many professionals are very adept, only a relatively small portion of them are recognized by the extremely wealthy and other professionals catering to those extremely wealthy individuals and families as the preferred authorities for their expertise. Most of the time, they are industry thought leaders.

They are thought leaders not because they say they are, but because other people “in the know” say they are. There are processes that can transform talented and proficient professionals into thought leaders and doing so is regularly required to source billionaires.

For this level of wealth, being a thought leader must tie tightly to the services and products you would be providing to billionaires. While cutting-edge solutions are not necessarily the answer every time, your ability to deliver state-of-the-art strategies and financial products intimately connected to your expertise is a necessity.

The value is not asset allocation, for example, but being able to source customized investments that fit into the billionaire’s asset allocation model. Another example is being able to put together a life insurance portfolio for a person this affluent. Here it is more about the ability to deal with underwriters and integrate the life insurance into a wealth plan than it is about the life insurance per se.

Communicating your proficiency at asset protection planning only the super-rich can use, such as the “floating island” strategy, is important for it lets you stand out from the array of very, very smart professionals seeking to do business with billionaires. It is not only about being able to deliver esoteric strategies when they are appropriate, but communicating that you are quite skillful at using these strategies.

Certain broad-based methodologies are also in high demand by billionaires. Being seen as incredibly adept with them is a complimentary way to be recognized as a thought leader. For example, stress testing is normative at these pecuniary heights. Stress testing is the evaluation of particular wealth management solutions, or, more broadly, the overall wealth planning presently being used by the billionaire. The aim is twofold:

• To ensure what the billionaire has done produces the results he or she desires

• To ensure the billionaire is not missing anything major when it comes to wealth management

Being seen as exceedingly skilled at high-quality stress testing, which entails not only addressing the technical issues but—more importantly—the human element, is a powerful way to attract the attention of billionaires (and their family offices) and deliver considerable value.

Being a thought leader with specialized, in-demand expertise will rarely result in billionaires contacting you. It is, however, foundational to establishing and nurturing strategic partnerships.

Build Strategic Partnerships

Strategic partnerships are strong relationships usually with other non-competing professionals who are working with billionaire clients. It is important to keep in mind that billionaires habitually have relationships with a multitude of professionals. Some of these relationships are transaction based; others are more extensive. Almost never do billionaires establish totally exclusive relationships with external providers.

Thought leadership content can be employed—through strategically broad but cleverly targeted distribution—to sensitive non-competing professionals to you, your firm and your expertise. For example, as a wealth manager, distributing high quality thought leadership content through well-researched international networks and associations of various types of professionals, such as lawyers and accountants, can be instrumental in finding some who are working with billionaire clients that potentially can benefit from your services.

When you have determined which particular professionals are possible strategic partners, you have to carefully evaluate each opportunity. In effect, you will need to develop deep understanding of their business models from how they source their super-rich clients to their capabilities and their limitations. Based on these insights for each possibly strategic partner, you decide whether to pursue a relationship or not. It is critical that you understand you are selecting whom to strategically partner with. The non-competing professionals are not choosing you.

With so many amazingly talented and adept professionals intent on working with billionaires and the fact that nothing is truly proprietary, you need some form of economic glue to solidify and enhance your relationships with your strategic partners. Part of the evaluation process is identifying how you can add value to each referring professional.

One of the most effective approaches is to help your strategic partners build their practices. Providing formidable business development support is one of the most powerful forms of economic glue.

A highly effective way to generate more business for your strategic partners is to help them become thought leaders and showing them how to monetize their industry stature. By providing them with high-quality thought leadership content they can use with their clients, prospects and referral sources, you are facilitating new business opportunities for them. It is rarely enough to give them the content and have them send it out. To get truly meaningful results will regularly entail working closely with them to determine whom to send what material, and you will need to make sure they appropriately follow up.

As part of the process, you will need to help your strategic partners effectively introduce you. A high degree of tactical precision is required, and they need to make a strong connection to your positioning as a thought leader. By not managing the introduction process, there is a high probability that your strategic partners will be not as effective as they could be, resulting in you having a much harder time getting the referred billionaire’s business.

Again, the thought leadership content you are using that has worked well in connecting you with other non-competing professionals will often be effective here. Some of the material should be provided to the billionaire and his or her other advisors based on circumstances. At best, doing so will both help solidify your stature as well as foster the halo effect.

In meeting billionaires and their teams, it is useful to remember that unless the matter they are considering you for is incredibly urgent (and most are not), it may very well take some time before you get a piece of business. Your investment product might be sensational but is unlikely to dramatically impact the lifestyle of billionaires and their families. What this means is that you will need to be patient and persistent for you to close business with billionaires. However, when you do the business can be extraordinarily profitable.

For All the Wealthy Who Are Not Billionaires

The methodology for sourcing billionaires is empirically derived and has been repeatedly validated in the field. When implemented well, it results in billionaire clients. Furthermore, when implemented well it also results in a significant number of super-rich and less affluent clients. While your focus might be on billionaires, the probability of being referred to clients worth hundreds of millions of dollars is likely to happen and with greater consistency.

In sourcing billionaires, while you are aiming for the very top of the financial pyramid, you will most likely end up generating more business with referrals that are less wealthy. Even carefully selected, most of your strategic partners might have some business with billionaires but will probably have the great majority of their revenues coming from ultra-wealthy and super-rich clients. In helping them with business development, coupled with a limited number of billionaire clients and limited influence, they will likely introduce you to whom they can.

A further consideration … this same methodology that lets you source billionaires is applicable everywhere for every type of professional expertise and all manner of prospective clients. Combining thought leadership with generating referrals from non-competing professionals is very probably the most systematic and efficacious way to source new wealthy clients. When it comes to sourcing billionaires, there are few—if any—other approaches that can deliver nearly as well.

Russ Alan Prince is president of R.A. Prince & Associates.