Designing the Future RIA – September 2024
As temperatures cool and pumpkin spice becomes a daily staple, we bring you a curated selection of impactful content designed to help you grow your firm while engaging your clients more meaningfully. In this issue, we’re serving up a refreshing blend of articles 📖, videos 🎦, guides ✍️, and useful tools all designed to keep you ahead of the curve. From industry trends and best practices to innovative strategies for client engagement and growth, we’ve got you covered with valuable resources designed to inform, inspire, and elevate your practice.
Highlights
- Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, breaks down the crucial distinction between planning and strategy, emphasizing that the two are not synonymous. A strategy is an integrative set of choices that positions you to win on your chosen playing field. It involves a coherent theory about why this field is the right one and how you’ll outperform competitors in serving clients. Here’s why it’s vital to avoid the “planning trap,” and get comfortable with the uncertainties of strategy.
THIS IS WATER! by David Foster Wallace
- An excerpt of a commencement speech by David Foster Wallace describing “sonder,” the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. It’s easy to get stuck in “default mode;” to make assumptions, to judge others by their actions and yourself by your intentions. Empathy can be a difficult thing to master, but we can all start by living a more compassionate life.
Cross-Generational Marketing Is Better Than a Great Divide (BAUM Feature):
- Advisors who stereotype boomers, Gen Xers and other clients by age run the risk of not understanding them at all.
Quick Hits:
- Is your financial marketing strategy missing the mark? What clients really want might surprise you.
- Elections, elections, elections. What questions are you asking your clients? Are they the right ones? Morningstar dives in.
- “The Pool of Desirable Clients Is Shrinking” – The median cost to acquire a new client has risen significantly, from just under $2,200 per client in 2021 to $3,800 per client in 2023—a 75% jump. Marketing spend amounted to 9.7% of revenue for average firms, but 12.5% of revenue in high-growth practices, according to a Kitces survey.
- Are you producing helpful, reliable, people-first content? Google talks AI-generated content.
- New SEC Risk Alert reveals heightened scrutiny areas under the revamped Marketing Rule.
Videos:
- Job Security is Dead…and Nobody Cares
- Why More Young People Are Getting Cancer
- Wait, why can politicians trade stocks
- Harvard psychiatrist on happiness: Positive vs. toxic relationships
Useful Tools and Guides:
- Thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems.
- How much it costs to market your business in 2024
From the CCO of a Large, National RIA:
“An industry colleague shared their recent exam findings regarding the new marketing rule and the use of superlatives.
…
The SEC cited the firms use of the word “skilled” as in: “we seek skilled money managers…,” which they believe is an aspirational statement. The examiners said verbally in the exit interview that they really dislike the word “skilled.”
They also found the word “expertise” objectionable – as in ” We provide the following services and expertise to our clients: …” “Expertise,” the examiners state, is reasonably likely to cause an untrue or misleading implication or inference to be drawn concerning a material fact relating to the investment adviser. This seems to be in line with their reference in the recent Risk Alert about implying that a firm has some quality/qualities that other advisers do not possess.”