Welcome back to the 202nd episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Pam Capalad. Pam is the founder of Brunch & Budget, a financial planning and coaching firm based in New York City that serves nearly 200 clients with a particular focus on first-generation immigrants and serving communities of color.
What’s unique about Pam and her Brunch & Budget business though, is the way she’s built her clientele by – literally – having brunch with prospects to talk about budgeting and other cash flow planning issues, and how she figured out how to turn that into ongoing financial coaching relationships paying as much as $300 to $900 per month on an ongoing basis for Pam’s structured financial coaching accountability system, coupled with 20-minute monthly check-in meetings.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Pam structures her ongoing monthly advice process, the upfront four meetings that she uses to onboard and start every client relationship, how she uses MeisterTask as the center of her client relationship to hold clients accountable for what they’re working on, the reason Pam decided to ditch eMoney advisor and now uses MX as her account aggregation client portal to help them through their budgets and track their monthly spending, and why Pam found that a higher frequency of shorter monthly meetings – quick touches with clients – was more effective than longer quarterly or semi-annual meetings when it came to helping clients actually make progress towards their goals.
We also talk about how Pam’s model itself has evolved from starting out with one-time engagement for providing budget and other financial advice to a monthly model that began at just $20 to $60 per month, and then increased to $100 a month, and then up to her current minimum of $300 a month as she built out her service model for clients. Why Pam’s model is built on a sliding scale that can amount to as much as 3% to 4% of a client’s household income, and how Pam justifies that advice fee to clients. And the group financial planning model that Pam is now beginning to test to expand the reach of her services to serve more people of color.
And be sure to listen to the end where Pam shares how hiring for scale became the biggest challenge in her business as it grew beyond her personal capacity to serve clients, how different it is to provide financial planning advice to clients who are the first generation of their family to accumulate wealth, and why she now frames her business niche as serving people who are afraid to talk about money and the ways that Pam has adopted her financial planning process to get them comfortable with working with her.
So whether you’re interested in learning how Pam uses MeisterTask to hold clients accountable, what made her decide to ditch eMoney Advisor and what she uses now, or how she is expanding the reach of her services to people of color through a group financial planning model, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.
