Guest: Heather Robertson Fortner, Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board of SignatureFD, an integrated and comprehensive wealth management firm with offices in Atlanta, Georgia and Charlotte, North Carolina. The firm was recently named to the Inc. 5000 and has grown from $250 million to more than $8 billion in assets under management during Heather’s tenure with the firm.
In a Nutshell: There’s no question that AI is going to revolutionize the technical side of financial advisory. The very best firms are already positioning themselves even further ahead of the curve by blending enhanced planning with more robust emotional and psychological planning to help clients make better money decisions.
On today’s show, Heather Robertson Fortner discusses how consistent execution, the “blocking and tackling” of success, and a disciplined, team-oriented approach has fueled her firm’s remarkable growth. She also shares how her unique background in professional counseling helped drive SignatureFD’s philosophy of “Net Worthwhile,” which goes beyond managing money and seeks to align wealth with a person’s core values and purpose.
.Heather Robertson Fortner and I discuss:
- Heather’s “my why” story and how it influences her approach to financial advisory.
- Helping clients answer difficult questions like, “How much is enough?”
- Equipping advisors to master their “soft skills” and have more personal conversations with clients about money.
- How Heather is building her dream marketing machine.
- Managing revenue goals and accountability.
- Using AI to centralize data and accelerate technical planning.
- Heather’s advice to aspiring leaders.
. Quotes:
Heather Robertson Fortner on how excellence creates growth:
“I think it is understated how much growth can come from working to run an excellent business day in and day out. I’ve watched a lot of baseball in my life. The teams that win consistently know how to manufacture runs. They know how to hit singles and doubles. And then when somebody is on second base, they know how to steal third, and then just another single puts them home. And so they’re consistently executing on the fundamentals of the game over and over and over with excellence. And then they have, hopefully, one or two superstars who can always hit a home run every time. And I think sometimes, as businesses, we forget that there is just a stable undercurrent of growth that happens when you are solidly hitting singles and doubles and manufacturing runs, day in, day out, every year, because it’s not sexy. But I think from an operational standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, from an experiential standpoint, from running an excellent business, from a people perspective — those are the things that you cannot compromise on. And I think a lot of times, businesses, specifically entrepreneurs, get bored with the unsexy part of running an excellent business. And it can get hard. We have focused all along on being excellent at the business, being excellent culturally, being excellent with our people, being excellent in the products and the services that we provide, providing an excellent experience to our clients, and never compromising on those things.”
Heather Robertson Fortner on defining Net Worthwhile:
“It’s always been a belief of ours at SignatureFD that wealth is more than money. Money is a tool and wealth in service of a purpose, whatever you define that purpose to be, is the best use of the tool itself. There are multiple purposes. People have multiple goals. They have desires in their lives. Our honing in on the term Net Worthwhile was years and years of understanding that purpose matters more than the tool itself and that purpose is different for everyone and that everyone has a different set of wealth at their disposal to help achieve those things that they find worthwhile. And so our job as advisors is simply to help harness, identify, structure, and order the things that are someone’s wealth, and then help them use different strategies and tactics in service of achieving those things that they find worthwhile. So it took us a long time to get to the culmination of the language and to submit that language through the organization.”
Heather Robertson Fortner on tailor-made AI:
“I think it’s going to be wildly impactful to our profession. We started a project two years ago to create a data warehouse for ourselves. So a place where we could pull data from all of our different systems, pull them into one place so that we could have one true source of data that we own. That has been wildly beneficial. Specifically from a business intelligence perspective, my belief is that our next foray into how to use AI will be to layer a ChatGPT or some type of artificial intelligence on top of that true source of data and start to build our own basic ChatGPT that is specific to SignatureFD. AI is only as good as the data underlying it, as the data you’re feeding to it. Not many advisory firms are great at the data. And so having that one true source of data was very important to us.”
