Welcome back to the 332nd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Liz Hand. Liz is the co-owner of Pleasant Wealth, a hybrid advisory firm based in Canton, Ohio that oversees $146 million in assets under management for 522 client households.
What’s unique about Liz, though, is how she and her brother have taken ownership of what was originally their father’s broad commission-based practice with more than 1,500 clients, and have managed the balance of transitioning the business into a fee-based financial planning practice while still doing right by the smaller or more transactional clients who may have been with the firm for a decade or more.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how, to realize their vision for the future of a commission-based firm their father originally built, Liz and her brother have gone through the messy multi-year process of refocusing to a niche and rightsizing their client loads, how Liz and her brother realized in the process of buying into the firm that they didn’t want to continue working on retirement plans and encouraged their father to sell that portion of the business to their former ONESCO branch office and use the proceeds of that sale to reduce the buyout cost for the portion of the firm they wanted to buy, and why Liz chose to change the firm’s B-D relationship from ONESCO to Kestra based not only on a pricing structure that was a better fit for where the practice was going, but also the cultural fit that she felt would better support them as advisors.
We also talk about why, before buying into her father’s firm, Liz decided to become the successor for another advisor so that she could have an opportunity to find her own voice as an advisor independent of being her father’s family successor, how, as a part of the process of fulfilling her vision for the firm, Liz has decided to focus the firm’s niche away from the Amish and Mennonite clientele that her father grew with over the years and towards independent women retiring alone who need not just an advisor but a thinking partner , and how Liz envisions to implement three tiers of service for the firm’s clients – Foundations (for legacy transactional clients who engage less frequently), Flow (for ongoing clients who want financial planning), and Flourish (a group coaching program to help clients actually implement recommendations and achieve their financial goals).
And be certain to listen to the end, where Liz shares how engaging with a mindset coach through Limitless helped her find the confidence to implement the changes she and her brother envisioned for the firm (and give herself permission to iterate over time instead of feeling pressure to have everything ready all at once), how Liz was inspired to become a mindset coach for other advisors and now is planning to use that training to incorporate mindset work and coaching for her own clients, and why Liz feels that younger, newer advisors trying to establish their voice as an advisor would benefit from joining more industry associations, both to gain more perspective on different methods of financial planning, and to find the ones that resonate most with them… so that they can be more of their own authentic selves with clients.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about the details of the succession plan that Liz, her brother, and her father agreed upon, how Liz overcame her own personal struggles while trying to establish her reputation as a knowledgeable financial advisor, or how Liz envisions the future of Pleasant Wealth, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Liz Hand.
