Welcome back to the 211th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Kristin Harad. Kristin is the founder of her eponymous marketing consulting firm for advisors, with a particular focus on both helping to coach solo advisors to the next level and providing outsourced CMO services to midsize RIAs. What’s unique about Kristin, though, is that she isn’t only a marketing consultant to advisors, but spent eight years building her own independent advisory firm, which she launched from scratch and had an incredibly fast growth start to nearly $200,000 of financial planning fee revenue alone in barely three years, and of course, grew even further in the years that followed all from applying her advisor marketing principles first and foremost to herself, and now she’s built a consulting business to teach others to do the same.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Kristin’s background in consumer marketing with a focus on building brand loyalty and retention programs provided a foundation for her to launch and market her own advisory firm. Why Kristin chose from the start to focus in on a niche before she even figured out what to call the firm or how to structure her services. The way Kristin’s clear focus on a particular target market of new and expecting parents and dual-income households in San Francisco gave her opportunities to market in an extremely cost-effective way. And the way Kristin marketed and offered ‘welcome’ kits to her prospects before their first meeting with her, to make it easier to convince them to work with her, as someone who wasn’t naturally inclined toward sales herself. We also talked about Kristin’s journey through the advisory industry, how her work in consumer marketing at large financial services firms from Chase Manhattan Bank to Charles Schwab built her initial awareness of the financial advisor industry.
Why it was an interest in life coaching that ended up being Kristin’s initial pathway to deciding to launch her own advisory firm. How Kristin overcame the unexpected career challenges that arose when she made the personal life decision to give her children a chance to live in a foreign country and had to uproot her own business in the process. And why in the end, Kristin’s passion for advisor marketing ultimately led her to transition her clients to the other advisor she recruited into her firm so that she could focus her full time on coaching other advisors in their marketing instead.
And be certain to listen to the end where Kristin shares her tips on how advisors can find the right target market to focus on when they’re not sure which one to pursue. The ways that a strong and persistent marketing process can make it easier for those who otherwise struggle with their sales process, and why once again selecting her own clear target market to work with, now in her advisor marketing business, is allowing Kristin to have her best business year ever in 2020 despite the turmoil of the pandemic.
So whether you’re interested in learning about how Kristin found her niche of working with new mothers, the challenges that arose from moving her family and business to a foreign country, or the cost-effective marketing strategy she used to attract her target clients, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.
