Welcome back to the 375th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Rob Schultz. Rob is the Senior Partner of NWF Advisory, a hybrid firm based in Los Angeles, California, where he oversees nearly $500M in assets under management for 200 client households.
What’s unique about Rob, though, is how he’s systematized his meeting process, from his meeting prep down to a standardized agenda flow that allows him to dig into client-specific details while also maintaining an efficient meeting process… which has allowed him to scale up to over 20 client meetings every week… and still keep his sanity and energy levels up so that this is sustainable to him as he builds his firm.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Rob sets the agenda for his 20+ meetings per week with his clients using a structured flow that always touches on the same key areas for every client, the way he leverages his paraplanner to prep a stack of client meetings so that he can knock through a week’s worth of meeting preparation in just a few hours every Monday morning, and the way Rob leverages the built-in audio transcription features in Microsoft Word itself to quickly wrap up his post-meeting notes at the end of each day.
We also talk about Rob’s journey from getting an undergrad in Kinesiology and starting med school to moving into accounting and then ultimately becoming a financial planner through the program at UCLA (because financial planning was the perfect blend of helping people the way he wanted to in medicine, and working with numbers the way he did in accounting), the way Rob has been able to grow by executing a series of “succession plans” where he buys out and takes over the practices of retiring advisors, and the way Rob has been able to scale up his efficiency further by getting more systematized with his investments, especially the rise in recent years of outsourced TAMP providers and the availability of ETF model portfolios.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Rob shares the impact it had when a mentor pointed out how he could be the smartest advisor out there, but if he couldn’t make enough money to last, he wasn’t going to be able to help anyone, how much Rob has realized that soft skills are required to get his clients into a mindset where they are on a good path and can use any extra money they have to make their own lives better, and how getting to the point where Rob was actually able to say “No” to prospective clients who he knew deep down really weren’t a good fit – but Rob finally felt he had the freedom to act on that reality – became the breakthrough that added greatly to his own mental health as a financial advisor .
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to grow your firm through succession plans, how much soft skills and client mindset are just as important as the knowledge you have as an advisor, or how to effectively manage an overwhelming amount of client meetings with ease, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Rob Schultz.
