Welcome back to the 172nd episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Minoti Rajput. Minoti is the Founder and President of Secure Planning Strategies, a hybrid advisory firm based near Detroit, Michigan, that oversees nearly $300 million of assets under management for 350 client households.
What’s unique about Minoti, though, is that she’s built her advisory firm by crafting a deep specialization in working with families with special needs children, and creating a truly multi-generational clientele in serving both the parents of those children and supporting the special needs trusts for those children long after their parents may pass away.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about what it really means to work with a niche of special needs families. The way Minoti structures her fees with the combination of an upfront complexity-based planning fee that may be the entirety of the relationship for some clients, the ongoing AUM fee she charges to work with more affluent families for ongoing special needs clients, the limitations of doing niche-based financial planning in traditional planning software, the need to use Word and Excel to create more custom plans, and how Minoti has been able to systematize and create repeatable expertise to keep even her custom-written financial plans very efficient to create and deliver.
We also talk about how Minoti built her niche in the special needs community itself. How she gathered the requisite expertise, it takes to understand the myriad of federal, state, and local programs available to support special needs families, the unique marketing opportunity she’s been able to create working with school systems where as many as 10% of students have some kind of special education needs, where Minoti draws the line between giving advice to special needs families but not serving as their special needs attorney, and how Minoti handles the real-world compliance challenges in providing this kind of specialized advice while being supervised by a broker-dealer compliance department.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Minoti shares why even though she’s gone deep into the specialization of serving special needs families successfully, she still keeps a client base where almost 50% of her clients are generalist and not niche clients, the most misunderstood aspects of what it takes to be profitable and grow scalably when serving a niche clientele like special needs families, and the resources she recommends, including books to read, organizations to join, and designations to pursue for other advisors who want to pursue such a rewarding and fulfilling niche as well.
