Welcome back to the 134th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Andrew Altfest. Andrew is the president of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, an independent RIA based in New York City that oversees nearly $1.3 billion for nearly 600 affluent clients.
What’s unique about Andrew, though, is that he’s become the second-generation leader in a family advisory firm founded by his parents who themselves were early NAPFA fee-only pioneers, and how he’s now positioning the business to grow and build upon their legacy in the decades to come.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about the dynamics of a family business. Why it’s often easier to find alignment in a family business because the values of the owners and parents tend to get transmitted to the children as successors within the family from a young age, how Andrew ended up finding the path to the family business despite having not planned to pursue it originally, and the ways his parents exposed him to all aspects of the business, from operations to clients from early on to build his breadth of experience as a future leader.
We also talk about how exactly Andrew is beginning to position the firm for the future, from rolling out a next-generation client service charging a minimum planning fee to serve the children of their current clients, to increasingly leveraging technology tools to communicate with clients by a wider range of means, and how Altfest eventually decided to hire tech developers and begin to create their own technology tools to better track and find planning opportunities for clients, a solution that they eventually intend to make available for other advisory firms as well.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Andrew talks about the changes he’s implemented as a leader of the firm since going back to get his MBA and participating in the Schwab Executive Leadership Program, from rolling out an annual client engagement and satisfaction survey that’s tied directly to the firm’s advisor compensation, the employee satisfaction surveys they do internally to evaluate their team, and the practical challenges that Andrew faced and overcame in trying to drive change in a long-standing, already-successful advisory firm.
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