Elite wealth managers are at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of advisor success. They adeptly incorporate advanced planning into their practices. They are skilled at building strong, lasting relationships with their affluent clients. They are earning substantial incomes and, most important, are delivering great value and making a major difference in the lives of their affluent clients.
How do these elite wealth managers do all this? By using a framework that you can adopt yourself in order to move up that hierarchy of success—all the way to the elite level if you so choose.
Overview Of The Elite Wealth Manager Framework
Elite wealth managers are dedicated to building simple, elegant businesses that are indispensable to the right affluent clients. They focus on serving fewer, wealthier clients extremely well. Their affluent clients benefit not just from astute investment management but also from a range of financial services and products beyond investments that are coordinated to optimize their benefits.
They also focus on building lives of significance. They are in business not just to have more business but also to make a real difference in the lives of their affluent clients and to support the quality of life that they want for all stakeholders, including teammates, partners and strategic partners.
And they focus on building their assets under management because the income from their asset management is largely what funds their life of significance.
These areas form the core of the elite wealth manager framework, as seen below.
The Elite Wealth Manager Framework
Three Levers Of Success
To work with fewer, wealthier clients, to acquire appreciably more assets to manage, to earn a substantial income and, above all, to build an amazing life of significance, you need to pull three levers of success. All these results are tightly interconnected, making each lever of success and its corresponding strategies essential to becoming an elite wealth manager.
1. Clarity of intention. Elite wealth managers are deliberate in their actions. They are deliberate, not reactive. They are clear and honest with themselves on where they are today and where they want to go. They have a solid grasp of what they need to do to achieve the level of success to which they aspire. They know that closing the gap between today and their professional future will happen not with wishful thinking but with smart and focused strategic action.
2. World-class client experience. Because nearly all financial products and services are commodities at some level, most financial advisors are somewhat fungible. However, for elite wealth managers, this is rarely the case. They have moved from being commoditized and easily replaced by other advisors to being powerfully differentiated from the great majority of advisors.
Elite wealth managers know that this depends on their ability to deliver an exceptional experience to their clients that is grounded in a deep understanding of client values, needs and wants, and extensive synergistic expertise provided by themselves and their professional networks.
3. Wealthy client pipeline. Elite wealth managers are no longer particularly concerned about where new affluent clients are coming from. They are very confident in their ability to source new business, including new affluent clients who are wealthier than the clients in their current book of business.
Elite wealth managers gain that quiet confidence by having systems in place that ensure that they are introduced to affluent prospective clients on a regular basis. Notably, they employ proven systematic methodologies to motivate centers of influence such as accountants and attorneys to send them highly qualified wealthy clients.
Nine Accelerators
Within each lever are three accelerators—areas of specific action that enable elite wealth managers to accelerate their success and consistently earn $1 million or more every year.
As you can see in the chart below, each of the nine accelerators ties directly to one of nine strategies.
Nine Accelerators And Nine Strategies
Chances are, some of these accelerators built into the elite wealth management framework may sound daunting. The good news is that in all likelihood, you already have implemented some or even all of the associated strategies to some extent. We call this “strategic stumbling”—in your efforts to grow your practice, you have already stumbled upon effective strategies.
However, to move to the elite level, you will want to act deliberately and systematically. The best way to begin to do so is with solid baseline knowledge of where you are right now. So assess what you’ve already implemented in terms of the levers and accelerators outlined above—and how well they’re working for you. Armed with that knowledge, you can start to focus your efforts in the areas that can help you move your practice up to a higher level of success.
John J. Bowen Jr. is the CEO and founder of CEG Worldwide and CEG Insights. Ready to get clear on your goals, deliver a world-class client experience and attract plenty of ideal new clients? Schedule your Play to Win consultation today to discover the tools, strategies and support that CEG Worldwide offers to help you achieve all those outcomes—and more.