Financial Advisor Success Ep 149: Managing Capacity And Ensuring Continuity For Clients By Selling Without Retiring with Susan John
Nov 5, 2019
Susan John, Managing Director of Financial Planning at F.L. Putnam and former founder who grew Financial Focus to $350M AUM, explains selling her firm while staying active. She discusses paid upfront planning snapshots, a proactive annual cash-plan and tax-coordination process, team coverage and ownership transition, and how she ensured client continuity and capacity in a rural market.
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Collaborate With Client CPAs Instead Of Preparing Returns
- Coordinate with clients' CPAs rather than doing returns in-house if tax complexity grows beyond your skill set.
- Susan prepares a tax package and answers CPA questions, which improved CPA relationships and referral flow.
Set A Yearly Firm Focus To Coordinate Team Attention
- Run firm-wide annual focus themes to ensure consistent coverage of important issues across all client relationships.
- Susan used yearly themes like estate planning or insurance and trained staff with extra meetings when complex cases appeared.
Build Simple Tools For Repeated Niche Decisions
- Build custom tools for recurring niche problems rather than forcing generic software to fit.
- Susan created spreadsheets to model continuing care retirement community contracts, rebates, and fee structures for client decisions.