What are ideal clients? Ideal clients are individuals, families or companies that best align with your financial goals and wealth management practice. These clients represent the ideal fit for your aspirations and expertise. Your ideal clients can make your wealth management practice extremely successful.

Concentrating on these clients can increase profitability. They will pay well for the value you can provide. Moreover, ideal clients are loyal, staying with you when times get tough, such as during a major market downturn. They are also more likely to be your advocates, helping you grow your wealth management practice.

Your powerful brand is why your ideal clients are inclined to work with you without meeting and talking with you yet. At the very least, they are strongly willing to speak to you about how your wealth management expertise can benefit them.

There are a few non-exclusive ways you can define your ideal clients. In this framework, there are three factors. One is the source of wealth. There is a strong commonality among clients based on how they make money. Another factor is their level of wealth. Another consideration when deciding who your ideal clients are is their profit potential.

There are two steps in deciding who your ideal clients are.

• Step 1: Choosing whom you want to benefit
• Step 2: Crafting your message

With your powerful brand, you promise results to your ideal clients. It is about more than just picking an attractive cohort. You must also be able to communicate that you can deliver exceptional value to that cohort. Your message embodies the promise your powerful brand is making to your ideal clients. Nevertheless, you have to choose a cohort.

Step 1: Whom Do You Want To Benefit?
Let us begin by determining who you are working with today. Let us use the following questions to define your clientele? 

• What is their source of wealth? This is usually how they earn their money or where the wealth came from, such as an inheritance or a particulate field such as medicine or high-tech.

• How wealthy are they? Wealth managers measure wealth using net worth, income and investable assets. How you define wealth is often a function of how you are compensated.

• How profitable are they? This is a calculation and sometimes an educated guess on how your clients impact your bottom line. The viability of different cohorts is a function of your wealth management business model.

Using the following matrix, identify your current and ideal clientele (Exhibit 1).

As you go through this exercise, it is worthwhile to be realistic regarding your ideal clients. For example, one wealth manager we spoke with primarily serves lower-level corporate executives and small businesses generating less than a million dollars annually. His average investment account is less than $250,000, and his most prominent client has an investment portfolio of $1.4 million.

In filling out the client matrix, his ideal clients are ultra-successful business owners earning more than $10 million annually. They want to sell these companies within the next two years and have not done anything about it. There is a sizable chasm between his current and ideal clients. It may be possible to surmount this chasm based on the wealth manager's skill set and network, but not in this case. 

While upgrading your wealth management practice can take time and effort, you must ensure that as you bring your ideal clients into your practice, you can deliver exceptional value to them and fulfill the promises made by your powerful brand. Exhibit 2 shows a wealth manager's current and ideal clients who worked through the exercise.

As in this example, there is usually a significant gap between the level of wealth and the profitability of current and ideal clients. But there is usually a pattern. For most wealth managers, the source of the wealth of their ideal clients tends to be the same as their current clients. As wealth managers become proficient in working with a cohort, they tend to want to continue doing so. The changes between their current and ideal clients are often the levels of wealth. This translates into greater profitability.

Identifying your ideal clients is intimately tied to specifying the results you promise them. Remember, your powerful brand is the exceptional value you can provide them. Pay attention to their projected profitability to ensure you achieve your financial goals. 

Step 2: Crafting Your Message
Having preliminarily decided who your ideal clients are, you must clearly define what your powerful brand will promise them. There are several related ways to think about this, including: 

• How do you want your ideal clients to see you before you meet them?

• What pressing issues and concerns do your ideal clients have that you can alleviate?

• What value will you bring to your ideal clients that will significantly improve their financial lives?

• How can your wealth management solutions better meet your ideal clients’ wants, needs, and preferences better than your competitors?

• What will the nature of the experience be for the ideal clients working with you?

• How will your ideal clients be confident that you can deliver state-of-the-art wealth management solutions?

• What are your ideal clients’ prevalent objectives? 

Your wealth management business model makes your powerful brand real by delivering the results you are promising. By deeply understanding your ideal clients and what you can do for them, you can craft a message at the core of your powerful brand. Succinctly…

Your message is the results you are promising your ideal clients.

Your powerful brand can be overarching or very tight. What is important is that you think of your ideal clients, what they are looking to accomplish and how your wealth management practice can help them achieve their financial and related goals. In Exhibit 3, we provide a starting point for thinking this through.

Now, you want to go through this exercise for your ideal clients. You want to delineate what you are promising them and how you will keep these promises.

Like most wealth managers, you will quickly discover that there is only so much variation among the promises you can make to your ideal clients. For example, almost everyone wants to pay less taxes. Similarly, nearly everyone wants protection from unfounded or frivolous lawsuits. Your message will likely be similar to that of other wealth managers. However, how you make these promises to different cohorts makes a difference. You have to be able to articulate your message exceptionally well. Furthermore, to deliver on the promises made by your powerful brand, you must be an expert on the financial strategies and products you will rely on.

Conclusions
In building your powerful brand, you decide who you want to benefit after specifying your financial goals. These are your ideal clients. Some wealth managers focus on defining their ideal clients, while others tend to be more expansive. Much of this has to do with the profitability of your chosen cohort. As you work on building your powerful brand, you will find a balance that works best for you.

Wealth managers often build a powerful brand by refining their ideal clients based on their ability to add and communicate exceptional value. Therefore, you need to constantly reevaluate your powerful brand.

Jerry D. Prince is the director of Integrated Academy, part of Integrated Partners, a leading financial advisor firm.