Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Taylor Pankratz and this is behind the Breakaway. Together with my co host, Jason Barber, this show takes you behind the scenes of leaving your captive broker dealer firm and explores the world of RIA independence.
All opinions expressed on the podcast by the hosts and guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Uptick Partners. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not legal advice and should not be relied upon as a basis for any decisions.
All right, another episode of behind the Breakaway. I think this is episode 18. All right, after we did two episodes, episode 18. Today we're going to talk about something we just announced. We just today interview with wealth management.com article should be coming out probably around the time this podcast comes live, which is Upticks transition Guarantee.
And basically we've been brainstorming how can we get advisors to be more confident in their that they're going to take their clients? Because if you guys are like, like we were, that was the biggest question we had going into it was, are our clients that we love and that we feel like we've done a good job for, are they actually going to follow us when we quit? I feel like every advisor has to probably be thinking about that.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: And we decided, all right, is there a way that we can align our interests with these advisors that join Uptick and because if the. If that advisor is not that confident, we are 100% confident that you're going to take the vast majority of the clients that you want, and we're going to make sure that you do that. And we're going to do that because we actually have a plan for how you're going to transition. Right. We're not just winging it.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: Yeah. We're going to put our money where our mouth is too.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: Right. So the way we think about this is the Uptick transition guarantee is you will be back to 100% of your previous revenue.
And until you do, you will get a hundred percent payout. Whether that takes three months, whether it takes six months, whether it takes a year, you're going to be making 100% payout for as long as it takes for you to get back to 100% of the revenue that you were used to making. And you might be listening to this going, is that a big deal? We're the only ones doing it. Okay. Every other place that will transition you doesn't do this because I think it's because they're not confident that you're going to actually be successful. They want you to be. But they're not going to be boots on the ground helping you actually move these clients over, opening up accounts, creating a marketing plan for you, making sure your website looks unbelievable so that when clients go to your website that they think that this is a professional thing, that you weren't just fired. But more so than that, we want your clients finding out that you left as soon as possible. And how do we do that? We need to get the word out through social media.
[00:03:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: We need to be running targeted campaigns, video ads to your city and or your state that announces that you left because we need your clients calling you instead of you having to try to find your client's phone number and make those phone calls yourself. Because you can only make so many phone calls in a day.
If your clients are calling, then you can have six people answering the phone and scheduling them or getting their information because they're calling you. So we think the transition guarantee, you can't just say that. And then it's. You have to be able to back that up. And what we're saying is we've created a robust marketing plan and then workflows with our technology stack that allows you to not lose track of where these prospects that are going to be clients, where are they in this process of from saying yes, I want to come to acats hitting. Right. So that you're keeping the momentum that we've talked about so many times on this podcast. Keeping that momentum up.
[00:04:28] Speaker B: Yeah. As Taylor, earlier today you were talking a little bit about this and I thought you made a great point as well along the lines of clients getting their feelings hurt if they didn't get a phone call very quickly. Thought it was really a brilliant approach because what you got to remember is most clients, and we know this now, they don't understand that you just resigned, walked out the door without their phone number. They don't understand that.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:53] Speaker B: They it's, they think that you own the business. They think that you, you have, you own your clients. They think you have their. They don't understand this concept that okay, I am an employee of Edward Jones. You belong, your relationship belongs to Edward Jones. They don't understand what a non protocol relationship is.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Or any captive broker dealer.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Or any captive broker dealer. Excuse me. Yeah, they don't understand that. And they get their feelings hurt because they find out about it from the babysitting advisor before they find out about it from, from you. And so I thought. How did you say that, Taylor? I think that you said the idea that we can tell this client say a client calls, they say, hey, I got my feelings hurt. Or you can genuinely say everybody found out about it at the same time. This is where I announced it in my video online to the entire state of Texas, to the entire state of Alabama, to the entire state, to the city of xyz. And that, I think, is a very unappreciated detail that I'm not sure I really candidly considered much prior to you even bringing that up.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's. I think the hardest part that advisors that are thinking about breaking away are. They're struggling with is I have all these grand plans about how I'm going to market my new business and bring in new leads, and I'm going to be able to do all these different things that I can't currently. And the answer is, you will be able to. The problem is it's really hard to learn how to do all of those things while you're trying to break away, while you're in the dog fight, because there's only so many hours in the day and you get so mentally exhausted. And you can't do any of this stuff ahead of time. You can't create your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles ahead of time. That's impossible to do unless you want to take on a tremendous amount of legal risk. You're probably not doing that, which means you're probably not setting up the infrastructure to be able to run targeted campaigns or ads on these websites ahead of time.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Shoot. I'm thinking, did we even. I mean, does. Does the average person even know how to do that? I mean, it takes.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: It took us months to try to figure it out. And that was when we were already. After we had already broke away, and we're like, okay, how can we go and market our business? But this wasn't marketing. Our announcement that we left our captive broker dealer, which is something that when we were gearing up for the breakaway that we just helped in Alabama with, we sat there and for a couple of weeks ahead of time, we're building out this marketing plan for him and figuring out what are the ways that we can get the word out as soon as possible that this person, that this advisor's leaving. And so we created the Facebook ads and the LinkedIn ads, created the videos, got the videos edited, and we push them live on the day that he breaks away. And it's a tremendous. It's amazing, the algorithms of how these websites work. I mean, you get a handful of your previous clients looking at these things, and then all of A sudden Facebook is magically putting that same video ad, your face in front of a whole bunch of people that know you. Because they. There's like a lookalike audience. And so they, they know.
Who else would think that this is useful information? And it's going to stay on the Facebook or LinkedIn website a little bit longer. And so they're going to put your face in. We had countless people calling in on this advisor that we just broke away in Alabama back in July, calling in, going, oh, I heard about you. I saw your ad on Facebook, I saw your video on Facebook and I'm calling. And the amount of time and energy that saves when you have clients that are calling you and calling your staff and they're answering the phone, it's, oh, yeah, here's my phone number. I want to come or I want to hear about it at least. And you're not having to find that person's information on the Internet. It's tremendous. The amount of efficiencies that you gain, which is why it comes full circle to why we think that you can get from basically resigning back up to 100% of what your revenue used to be, your gross revenue used to be. We think we can get you there in months instead of where you go some places. It takes years.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
In our first case study, I think it was by month four. Right. So we think that for sure.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: So the advisor that we just broke away.
[00:09:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:42] Speaker A: $300 million advisor, he was back to 100% of his previous gross revenue in four months.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And for us, I think it took longer. It was closer to maybe nine or 10 months. But we also, we had a ton of things that we did wrong in our transition in terms of. We did. We didn't even have the ability or the know how to do any type of social media, anything. And so we were literally. It was like we could have done our transition in 1980s.
[00:10:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: It was all by phone.
[00:10:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:10:17] Speaker A: That's all it was. It was just smile and dial. Call these people, find them on the whitepages.com.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:10:22] Speaker A: And so it truly is. I mean, if you're talking about, take us for an example. If it took nine or ten months, and for this guy, this other advisor, it took four.
If, I mean, four months earlier is your backup to speed. That's that much less money that you're coming out of pocket, out of your bank account to cash flow your business. That's that much more revenue that you're bringing in. Of course, but it's that much faster that you're able to pivot and start to attract new business and start to go, okay, I've, I'm, I've moved everybody that's going to move that's going to follow me. Now we're on to bigger and better and growing new people. Because even while we were in Alabama for two weeks with this other transition, he was getting new clients that had that. He didn't even know who they were. They were just because these, again, these ads are hitting people and they're going.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Oh, a fiduciary, a fee only advisor in my town. Brand new fee only advisor. The only one.
[00:11:24] Speaker A: Only one. I like this idea. And it's, hey, cool that we weren't even targeting that person really. But it was bringing in new business. And the, there's just something. I think the whole goal of the transition guarantee. Transition guarantee is to have advisors feel more confident that you're going to be wildly successful. You're not going to be. The industry average is 75. You're going to move 75% of your existing clients are going to follow you. There'll be a small contingent that don't come because of one reason or another. There'll be another small contingent of clients that you don't even want. But you're going to move 75% on average of your existing clients to the new firm.
And what we're thinking is that we want that number to be more like 100%. Right. Or 90%. The problem is advisors think they're going to be an anomaly and be 20 or 30. They're like, oh, the 75% is an average. I'm going to, it's going to be my luck that I'm only going to move 30 and I'm going to be this, it's going to be this failure type thing.
[00:12:32] Speaker B: But the reality is too, I think it's important to point out that the, Even if to get back to 100% of your revenue, in most cases, in many cases, you may only need to bring about 70, 75% of your assets. Okay. To get back to being at 100% of the revenue that you were at before.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: And so that's a worthwhile thing to point out because it's a lot more. I think at the end of the day, that's what most advisors are focused on is I don't want to go through this transition and take a pay cut. Right. That's what they, that's what they don't want to do.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Go to the place that you're going to transition more of your assets, you're going to trend. You're going to get back more of the money you're used to making and then some. You're going to go to a place that you're going to be able to grow tremendously and bring in new business, grow your client base, grow up market if you want to do that, and a place that allows you to serve your clients with excellence and not have to worry about all this compliance, oversight and the technology and all this stuff. Go to a place that's already got that stuff figured out, that is built by advisors for people just like you.
[00:13:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: There's not a better place that has better economics paired with the services that you actually want and need. All right, so with that, hey, if you've got questions for us, if you've got anything that you want us to specifically answer on the podcast or just want to find out a little bit more information about Uptick Partners, you can go to our website, uptick partners.com or you can subscribe to our newsletter, bb monthly.com it's again, it's a once a month newsletter. I think it's worth your time. It takes about five minutes to read it and it's just really just a recap of what we've of industry news for the month. So with that, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed the podcast. Please subscribe to our channel. You can find more of our episodes on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And check us out at uptickpartners.com where you can learn more about how we help breakaway advisors just like yourself find independence.
