Welcome back to the 174th episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Shanna Tingom. Shanna is the founder of Heritage Financial Strategies, a dually registered advisory firm located near Phoenix, Arizona, that oversees $50 million of assets under management for nearly 250 middle-market clients. What’s unique about Shanna, though, is the way she’s been able to weave together her advisor technology stack to heavily automate key processes throughout her firm to service 250 clients efficiently and did so by not using industry-standard CRM systems.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Shanna’s unique advisor technology stack. Why she chose to use marketing automation provider HubSpot for not only her website, but her core CRM system and business workflows, the way she’s adopted Zapier as a solution to integrate HubSpot into industry or software providers, and why she selected PreciseFP and not her own CRM system to become the core data hub for her advisory business.
We also talk about Shanna’s journey through the advisory business itself. Why she’s thankful she started out at a large financial services firm for their training and infrastructure, why she ultimately chose to make the transition to become an independent advisor instead, the difficult challenges that Shanna faced when going out on her own and losing the existing infrastructure and premier brand that a large firm provides, and how she selected Cambridge to become her new independent broker-dealer platform for the future.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Shanna shares the moment where she was so unhappy in her advisory firm that she was about to quit altogether, how delegating investment management to third-party TAMPs helped restore her own happiness and well-being, the way she now structures her AUM and planning fees to incorporate investment advice, financial planning advice, and the cost of third-party providers, and the mental trick of drawing lines in the sand that Shanna uses to help herself make changes that she knows will be difficult to make.
