Guest: Carley Dillon, Chief Experience Officer at Brighton Jones.

In a nutshell: Organic growth doesn’t just “happen.” It takes “intention and attention” to set goals, create action plans and playbooks, and get to work! Brighton Jones is a great example of a firm that is very clear on their mission and how they go about delivering on it.

On today’s show, Carley Dillon shares the strategic and tactical framework behind Brighton Jones’s stunning success, including their intense focus on metrics, culture, growth, referral marketing, and how they’ve structured their regions and “pods” to deliver “wealth alignment” that goes far beyond typical financial advice.

.Carley Dillon and I discuss:

  • The metrics driving Brighton Jones’s vision and mission.
  • Brighton Jones’s unique approach to business planning.
  • How Brighton Jones organizes its regional “pods” to deliver consistent service while achieving specific goals.
  • The importance of Mindfulness and Emotional Social Intelligence (“MESI”).
  • Identifying ideal client personas.
  • Broadening the client experience to include world-class events (like an African safari!) and charitable missions.
  • Why Brighton Jones prioritizes homegrown talent, its unique promotion paths, and how its compensation package works.
  • The channels Brighton Jones targets to achieve its annual 15% growth goals.

. Quotes: 

Carley Dillon on business development and metrics:

“The process starts off in July, and we start thinking about what are the key metrics as an organization that are really important for us to hit? What are our retention metrics? For us, it’s 98%. What are our growth metrics? We want to be growing at a 15% clip; by the way, we’ve hit that every single year. That’s all organic. Even more specifically, what we’re trying to do is grow 15% organic year over year. And 7.5% of that we want to come from client referrals. We call it ‘having intention and attention.’ We all have great intentions, but you have to put attention to the things that you want to achieve. So 7.5% of our 15% is coming from client referral. And then 7.5% is coming from other channels and other categories that we measure. We want to run an organization where people love where they work, so we have metrics of success around that. We also have metrics of success around just our people side of the business. How much do we want to grow by? And it’s all driven by some internal modeling we have.”

Carley Dillon on having impactful conversations with clients:

“Sometimes they do take three hours. All advisors want to be in a place where you can take that time. And we talk often about, what are the explicit needs that our clients are coming to us with? And we want to make space and time to talk about whatever that is. And sometimes those really resonate with the balance sheet. Sometimes we put our CFP hat on and say, yes, I can solve those problems for you. But oftentimes we sit in that crossroads of financial advice and life with our clients and they want to talk about what’s going on with their family. They want to talk about how they need to update their estate plan, but they’ve got some real turmoil. And so that’s where our ‘MESI’ skills come in. We have a fabulous platform. It sounds complicated, but it’s all about asking good questions, creating space to really thoughtfully listen, giving our advisors and our team members the tools to reflect back. ‘What I heard you say is … Tell me more …’ And our clients really respond to this. Of course, they don’t know we’re using our ‘MESI’ skills on them, but what they tell us is, ‘I trust my team. You’re credible, you’re reliable, and we have intimacy. So I’m never going to leave Brighton Jones. I’m going to stay here and I’m going to give referrals to my friends and family.’ It’s just such an invaluable tool set to really make sure that you’re listening, you’re asking good questions, you’re thoughtfully responding.”

Carley Dillon on Brighton Jones’s three-to-five-year vision:

“I’m excited about the future. I think we are very lucky that we get to work with really smart people. People who care about our clients. We’re going to continue to talk about wealth alignment, and that really just means understanding our clients’ values, understanding their passions and connecting those to their balance sheets more often. That’s something that we’ll spend a lot of time on over the next three-to-five years. Continue to grow organically — that is one of our secret sauces. Will we look at inorganic growth in the future? Probably, but the sweet spot is really that organic growth. Working on female services, working on women-led services, is something that you’ll see more and more from Brighton Jones. If I could be so bullish, I want to have a female-only service line in the next three-to-five years, where women can come and really get the additional services they need, get that counsel when they’re going through those tough life moments. And then increased ownership. I want to make sure that we are focusing on empowering more and more of our team members to become owners in Brighton Jones. So pathway to ownership is something we will continue to focus on.”

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