How Financial Professionals Can Capitalize on Today’s Opportunity

There’s a moment in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland where Alice admits she doesn’t much care where she ends up. The Cheshire Cat’s reply is blunt: then it doesn’t matter which road you take.

Most financial professionals care deeply about where they’re going. The firms recruiting them often don’t.

That’s the problem in today’s talent market. Mega broker-dealers and large RIAs compete hard for top advisors, offering impressive transition packages and sign-on deals. What they rarely do is sit down, ask the right questions, and genuinely listen to the answers.

Billy Hopkins addresses this head-on in his latest article, A Tad from Perfect. He shares a candid conversation with a financial professional who believed Silver Oak was the better firm but assumed a larger competitor could pay more. Maybe, but that firm probably never asked where the advisor truly wanted to go.

Money matters, but numbers won’t tell you whether a firm will support your long-term vision or just plug you into their existing model.

We call ourselves “a tad from perfect” on purpose, investing heavily in our people, our technology, and our advisor community rather than a marketing budget. Over 26 years, we’ve built a flywheel around five disciplines that independent entrepreneurial advisors need to scale: wealth management, financial planning, technology, business planning, and community.

The framework supports advisors on their own terms. No one tells you what to do or how to do it.

Stop asking what can get you where you want to go and start asking who.

Read the full article for more here.

Since Silver Oak was founded in 1999, the financial industry has changed drastically.

Beyond the obvious acceleration of digital capabilities affecting every aspect of our lives, impacting how clients and financial professionals communicate and work together, the population of investing individuals has grown significantly.

And while many high net worth individuals used to prefer working with multiple financial specialists – from homeowners’ insurance, to retirement planning and brokers – today’s investors prefer working with one team to provide a comprehensive look into their entire financial life.

Meanwhile, the shift away from retirement pensions to 401ks has opened the door for more investors to take advantage of effective retirement planning vehicles. Not only are more people investing, but more investors are becoming increasingly sophisticated.

At the same time, financial professionals have freedom to charge for their services the way they want, whether that’s through fee-based or AUM-based structures, and take on as many clients as they’d like. That leaves a huge opportunity for those in the financial services industry to customize their services and build a client base to the specifications they prefer.

So how does a financial professional take advantage of all that opportunity?

The answer: approach your business today with an open mind. Especially as the industry shifts to a digital-first mindset, financial professionals who embrace not doing things the way they’ve always been done have an opportunity to take advantage of so much growth–such as the ability to reach a younger generation.

Plus, financial professionals who combine the right team with the right resources and the right way of thinking are set up for the future as our industry continues to evolve.

If you want to take advantage of today’s opportunity and adopt meaningful change, get in touch with Silver Oak for a conversation.

Or dig deeper into this topic by listening to Episode 1 of the BluePrint Podcast, hosted by Silver Oak’s own Kyle Kuyat and Billy Hopkins. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

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