Guest: Katie Cullen, CFP, Head of BlackRock Business Consulting.
In a nutshell: The financial advice business is getting more complex by the day. Clients want more personalization, a more comprehensive menu of services, and a wider breadth of advice covering all the intersections of life and money.
Add in the pressure on advisors to use tech to serve more clients and manage bigger teams and the ultimate question you’re facing is no longer how to grow your business.
It’s how you’re going to lead your business.
On today’s show, Katie Cullen discusses how her team at BlackRock works directly with growth-minded advisors and executives on refining strategy, improving business efficiency, developing leadership skills, serving high-net-worth clients, and building more durable advisory firms.
.Katie Cullen and I discuss:
- The rapidly changing demographics of wealth as women gain more financial control and boomers begin transferring assets to the next generation.
- How advisory firms should be targeting the estimated $2 trillion in unmanaged assets.
- Clarifying your firm’s ideal client to create truly personalized services.
- Why a strong strategic vision must have a clear “end state” and be specific enough to help firm leaders know when to say “No.”
- How Katie leans into her military background with “Commanders Intent” and “Action Reviews” to guide disciplined daily action and achieve operational goals.
- “Mission fist, people always.”
Katie Cullen on coaching more female investors:
“I think advisors understand that they need to serve women investors because it’s good for business. The amount of wealth that women are going to and continue to attract and retain and control is only growing. I think where the breakdown sometimes occurs is because women’s life journeys are different. They have to take pauses in their career journeys to care for loved ones more often than men. They might have different professions that are sometimes lower-earning than men’s. They might think about their investing differently. Typically, women are more risk-adverse than men are, so they might not start with a growth orientation as quickly as men do. A lot of times women are not as financially literate — not always, but a lot of times — as their male counterparts, so they’ll be less involved in the portfolio construction or less involved in the financial plan that is created. And I think coming into those conversations, advisors have an opportunity to speak to them about being their financial coach. Speak to them about what is it that their intentions are for their assets. How do they think about deploying their capital? Where are their concerns? Talking to them more as a coach than as an advisor feels really good. Talking to them early on about what wealth means and where they’d like it to be in the future. More goal orientation is a very important part of women’s focus when it comes to their wealth.”
Katie Cullen on strengthening your vision:
“A strong strategic vision is one that truly changes how a firm operates, not just how it talks about itself. And what we see across the industry is that most firms have vision in language, or sometimes even painted on a wall, but they don’t actually have it in practice. And it tends to be aspirational, but not really specific enough to guide decisions or even behavior. But the strongest visions really look quite a bit different, and I can point to three things that they do that is different.
“The first one is they have a very clear end state. Not just that we want to grow, but where are we actually going, what are we building, and why are we uniquely positioned to do that? What are we building towards? And that long-term clarity is what allows organizations to allocate resources and frankly make consistent choices across the entire leadership team.
“The second one is they’re commercially specific. The best teams are very clear on who we serve, how we are differentiated in what we offer, what is our client experience. And that means they understand their ideal client, their differentiated value proposition, and what is going to drive new business for their particular organization.
“And then the third thing I’d point to, and it’s where a lot of firms fall short, and that is a strong vision acts just as much as a decision filter in guiding where to say No as it helps in guiding where to say Yes. It informs leadership of things like hiring, new clients, products, capital allocation, even client segmentation. And then it guides the advisors and the colleagues, the team members about how and where to spend their time, because we find, on average, about 40% of advisors’ time is not spent in front of clients. And some of that time is not optional. You have to do some operational work. Many people do have to do a lot of investment research and work on the portfolios. But a lot of that 40% non-client time could be brought back to the advisor if they understood truly what the vision of the organization is. And it’s not about intent or enthusiasm. It’s really about that clarity of the vision and then the ongoing work that goes around that.”
Katie Cullen on “Commander’s Intent”:
“It’s actually a superpower, I think, of a lot of leaders. You can state what the purpose of the particular mission is or the particular activity that you’re working on. You can create what is the desired goal. You can be really clear and communicate it in a way that they really don’t need any further information, and then you get out of the way and you let them deploy their ingenuity. You let them deploy their own expertise in delivering on that. I think sometimes that people will talk about the vision, and they’ll talk about it as something so incredibly aspirational, but not achievable, and individuals don’t know how they fit into that vision. By creating the clear outline of what it is and why it matters, but then letting people lean into that vision and deploy it in a way that’s specific to them, is super important.”
