Guest: Lisa Salvi, Managing Director, Advisor Services at Charles Schwab.

In a Nutshell: If you could start from scratch and sketch out what the ideal advisory practice looks like, what would you come up with?

Lisa Salvi and her team have developed just such a blueprint for what the most successful firms at Charles Schwab are doing to manage and grow their businesses.

On today’s show, Lisa and I dig into the details of Schwab’s 2024 Benchmarking Study, paying particular attention to the five Guiding Principles for Advisory Firm Success that Lisa says separate good firms from the best of the best.

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Lisa Salvi and I discuss:

  • Intentionally creating and managing your brand.
  • The metrics that Schwab’s study ties to “outperformance” of other firms.
  • How to create a strategic plan and hold team members accountable for following through.
  • Integrating key strategic initiatives into paths to promotion and succession planning.
  • Focusing on an ideal client persona and origin stories to enhance your website, branding, and marketing.
  • Using AI, CRM, and other tech to standardize and accelerate workflow so advisors have more time to focus on clients.

Lisa Salvi on the five Guiding Principles for Advisory Firm Success:

“The first one is that effective planning and execution is a leading indicator of success. So that’s where we really want to see firms have a focus and an innovative mindset.

The second one is that value is defined through your client’s eyes. You want every person, process, service offering, and communication tactic to maintain that focus on your ideal client.

Our third one is that operational excellence creates greater capacity for clients. And so this is where we put things like technology optimization, strong operations, a culture of compliance, and core cybersecurity.

Our fourth one is that your reputation is your brand. So this is all about marketing. It’s about every single aspect of your firm, from your employees to the centers of influence you seek to work with, your clients, even your digital presence — they all should be amplifying your reputation within the community it serves.

And then the last, but arguably the most important one of all, is that people are your most important assets. So how do you create that cycle of opportunity to both attract and retain top talent?”

Lisa Salvi on the importance of developing an idea client persona:

“We want your ideal client persona to be so detailed you feel like they could walk into the room. We want you to know their name or the couple’s name, or the family’s name. We want you to know what life stage they’re at, hobbies, activities, philanthropy, mindset, community involvement, career, pets. Really make it vivid and then start to view your business through what would this ideal client want and get everyone in your firm asking those questions and make decisions. It’s not only important for marketing and branding, it’s important for where you invest in the tech stack. It goes well beyond just the typical, ‘I want a delegator with this much money.’ It’s really bringing that vividly to life, and then making sure your entire team is connected and understands who you’re building this business for.”

Lisa Salvi on using client feedback to improve the value you deliver:

“This is more just talking directly to the clients. A lot of firms will set up a goal: ‘We want you to ask every client, once a year, this one question or these three questions.’ I think it’s scary at first and not as scary later. The second way we see firms do it is with a client survey where they can anonymously ask clients periodically and really gain insight into what’s going on. And then the third way is setting up a client advisory board. That can be very powerful. We have firms that have set those up and their advisory board will help review new marketing concepts or rebranding concepts or talk about community involvement. Often those board members become some of your best referral sources, because they’re close to the firm and the strategy and are very invested in success, but it can start as simple as just asking some simple questions in your client meeting and starting to track those and understand the trends and deepen understanding. One of the things I love about this industry and that’s kept me in it for so long is how attuned advisors are to the client experience and how much clients tend to appreciate advisors too. So I think there’s more to gain than to lose. But even negative feedback, you would rather hear it from your client because that is where you can make some adjustments to your strategy.”

Generating a Client Persona Using AI

Here’s a sample prompt I used in the paid version of ChatGPT4o:

“I uploaded a client persona template. I’d like you to take that template and fill it in for an ideal client of an RIA firm that works with clients who have at least $2 million of assets to invest and who need sophisticated wealth management services. Give the persona a personal name. The target client is either near retirement or in retirement. Go into significant detail in each area of Psychographics and the Other categories. Format the persona in a tabular format. “

Here’s a link to download the client persona template referenced in the prompt.

Here’s a link to download the sample client persona generated by the AI prompt.

To generate a prompt more in line with your ideal client, simply change the prompt to reflect your ideal client and continue to prompt the AI with more refined questions.

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