Bill Keen and Matt Wilson On How a Hyper-Local Niche Built a $1B RIA Organically

Guests: Bill Keen, Founder and CEO, and Matt Wilson, Chief Investment Officer and President, of Keen Wealth Advisors, a billion-dollar-plus RIA in Overland Park, Kansas.

In a nutshell: Bill Keen named his book Keen on Retirement: Engineering the Second Half of Your Life. It’s a title that speaks to his firm’s intentional, comprehensive planning process. But “engineering” is also a nod to the unique niche that Keen Wealth has carved out among local engineering, architecture, and construction companies, leading to consistent organic growth. Bill, Matt, and their team have become such experts in these companies’ retirement and benefit programs that even their HR professionals call Keen Wealth with questions.

On today’s show, Bill Keen and Matt Wilson explain how they’ve went deep and narrow into their niche, establishing their firm as thought leaders and exceptional service providers. They also discuss how they’ve managed their personal transitions from advisors to leaders as they continue to scale their firm.

.Bill Keen, Matt Wilson, and I discuss:

How Bill’s experiences at big brokerage firms informed his vision for Keen Wealth.
Maintaining a consistent client experience while growing.
Building your credibility as a thought leader via marketing and educational events.
Why engineers aren’t as difficult to work with as some advisors might think.
Transitioning clients between advisors and managing referrals who come to the firm expecting to work with the boss.
Keen Wealth’s checklist-driven financial planning process.
Using a vision for the future and community impact to attract and retain top talent.

. Quotes:

Bill Keen on building your credibility and your client base through perseverance:

“There’s reputation, there’s history, there’s brand, there’s credibility, there’s social proof around having done it. For somebody listening to this just trying to get started, the good news is it’s still possible. The bad news is it takes time to build that credibility. You have to have staying power and you need to be a thought leader in your industry and a thought leader around whatever niche you decide to go work with and become a specialist at, and have that voice out there, everywhere. Back when I started, you could actually call people. It’s different now. It’s social media, it’s webinars, it’s ever-presence out there. And again, it’s consistency. Staying power has been something that’s been really important for us. A lot of people say, ‘Oh that doesn’t work. Seminars don’t work. Webinars don’t work.’ You name it. But a lot of times folks just aren’t sticking with it long enough to see the fruits of their labor.”

Matt Wilson on building a knowledge base that benefits your niche:

“ I’ve been getting copied on emails all day about a local company in Kansas City that is a privately held ESOP, and it’s having a share buyback program. We’ve got nonstop communication internally on how this works and who it impacts. Our team is so focused on the financial planning side of the equation for everyone that they just eat up all this planning. To them it’s, ‘We need to understand all this.’ So they read it and they document it, they model it into the financial planning software, how it’s going to work when shares are coming in over time. And we’re able to model that in and present it in such a way so people can understand it. And that’s how we can communicate it and we can communicate it to the HR people: ‘Hey, this is how we understand it.’ We’ve had several comments from them over the years that, ‘You guys seem to know these things better than a lot of people do.”

Bill Keen on the value proposition of comprehensive financial planning:

“Anyone who’s practicing in the financial planning field is going to have some sort of a questionnaire that they walk clients through and hopefully some sort of a way of taking that information that they gain about the client and the client’s family tree and their history in that initial meeting. What’s their life look like? What’s their relationship with money? And then pivoting over into, ‘Who does your taxes? Do you have an estate plan? What does your insurances look like?’ All the things that any financial planner going through a process would talk about up to and including now, pivoting over into the assets, getting truthful about where someone stands. Truth is the starting point. It’s not the ending point. ‘Now we know where we are, let’s make a plan.’ And so having a way to walk through that each and every time with a client so that it’s consistent, the process actually starts to sell itself. Walking people through that with whatever the culture is of your individual firm so that it supports the culture of your firm. The questioning is a client experience. Being a good listener, documenting things, and then taking that data and running it through a checklist that you’ve created that says, ‘How do we make sure we don’t miss something?’ There are a lot of rules and regulations out there, whether it’s tax or IRA rules or pension law or state planning rules. How do we run that through there without missing something and how do we do it consistently each and every year so that the client experience is extremely consistent and it’s correct? We’re making changes today that could affect somebody years down the road, and we’re thinking through all that and we know how to communicate it as well. So not only are we doing it, we’re communicating it to folks so they understand the value of it.”