Guest: Rachel F. Elson, CFP®, a financial advisor at Perigon Wealth, an RIA with more than $8 billion in assets under management.
In a nutshell: Making a successful mid-career switch into financial advising is no small feat. My guest today made the leap from personal finance journalism to second-seat advisor to lead advisor managing a full book of high-quality clients.
On today’s show, Rachel Elson discusses how she learned to manage relationships with over 50 households, many of whom are younger tech professionals. We also explore Rachel’s perspective on what makes an effective advisor in today’s environment, including the critical importance of really listening to clients and understanding the nuances of what they’re saying and, sometimes, what they’re not saying.
.Rachel Elson and I discuss:
- What attracted Rachel to Perigon, their approach to training new advisors, their team-based service model, and their systematic frameworks for handling common client scenarios.
- How Rachel’s journalism skills prepared her to have a wide range of conversations with clients.
- Managing client handoffs between lead advisors.
- How Perigon allows individual advisors to focus on specific niches.
- Growing via referrals and referral services.
- How tech can give advisors more time to deepen relationships.
- Why Rachel believes more firms should develop internship programs.
. Quotes:
Rachel Elson on how training developed her ability to communicate and connect:
“A lot of it was not being taught to do something. It was simply being in the room and hearing how the conversations happen, and seeing somebody else do something right, and learning how to do that, and learning how to mirror that. We’re not a uniform advice provider. Perigon is very committed to having all of its advisors have their own way of doing things. But we have a lot of really smart, talented people. Once I was in the meetings, I was the second seat in a lot of meetings with our CEO and with our head of planning and really understanding how they approach things and just learning to mirror that. And there’s certain language we use, ways of explaining things that get carried on from advisor to advisor. We all sit in the same room. We hear someone else talking about something. We just picked up a phrase from one of our younger advisors. She started talking about thinking about cash and about bonds as lines of defense. ‘Cash is your first line of defense. Bonds are your second line of defense.’ I was like, ‘Oh, that’s really good phrasing. That’s an interesting way of presenting that.’ So I’m always looking for ways to explain something, ways to connect.”
Rachel Elson on working with young people who have high earning potential:
“ This is going to be very controversial: I knew that I wanted to work with younger people in their thirties and forties. And I asked every firm, ‘Do you have a minimum? And what do you do if you have a couple, they’re both in their thirties, they both work in tech, maybe they make $350-400,000. They are going to be very successful, but they’re not at your minimum yet.” And almost everyone said, ‘They’ll come back to us when they have enough.’ Then I got to Perigon and I asked our CEO, ‘What do you do when you have these young, high-earning couples and they’re building their lives and making big decisions? What do you do about them?’ And he said, ‘We work with them because this is when they need our help.’ I thought, ‘Okay, I found my place.’ There’s a lot of value to the firm in having a client base that’s growing wealth. My team’s median client age is 39 or 40. And for the most part, our retired clients are people where someone said, ‘Oh, could you work with my mom? Could you help my dad figure some stuff out?’ We start with the younger generation and then we go up.”
Rachel Elson on the skills advisors need to succeed in the future:
“ I think that one piece of it is really knowing how to listen to a client and knowing how to hear them. Not just taking notes, but hearing what they’re saying and even hearing what they’re not saying. I also think that just knowing the underpinnings of our plan, being really deeply rooted in the planning process, in the calculations, gives you a place where you can talk about things. Ideally all of our interns would become planning associates and eventually associate advisors. So as they are starting to come into meetings and learn things, the first time when they’re really talking in a meeting and really presenting is doing the eMoney presentation, because I know that they were in the weeds on that and they know all the assumptions that are built in and they’ll be really confident. Are they going to be super confident asking about X personal topic, what’s been happening about somebody’s IVF process, for example? Maybe not. But they’re going to be really good on the eMoney presentation and that just gets them used to talking, it gets them used to presenting, and to understanding what they’re talking about, and building confidence.”
