Welcome back to the 369th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Michelle Ogden. Michelle is the founder of Ogden Wealth, an RIA based in Maitland, Florida, that oversees $50M in assets under management for almost 120 client households.
What’s unique about Michelle, though, is that after seeing the challenges that come with too-fast growth in her husband’s business, she decided to be very slow and methodical in her own growth and limit her need to rely on any staff for more than a decade… only to eventually hit a wall when the whole business relied on her, leading her to eventually decide to partner with a TAMP, and then quickly more-than-double her business in the subsequent few years by finally getting to just focus on what she does best!
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Michelle’s journey from vowing to avoid the Financial Advisor industry after a negative internship experience as a woman in a male-dominated wirehouse in the 1990s to eventually coming into the industry with a positive experience at Charles Schwab and ultimately forming her own successful RIA, how a wariness of trusting others led Michelle to slow the growth of her own firm and the way partnering with third-party platforms including Edelman Financial and then Carson Partners ultimately allowed her to unlock the next level of growth and better leverage her own skills, and how word of mouth through Kingdom Advisors and her strategy of simply passing along financial information she found that she thought might be helpful to others on Social Media gave Michelle the reputation of being the person to connect with for any questions surrounding anything with a dollar sign and eventually grew her client base.
We also talk about Michelle’s experience with Charles Schwab and Edelman Financial and how to support of those relationships, combined with her husband’s travails in running his own business, led Michelle to structure her work in a way that brings her joy rather than just money, how Michelle overcome the challenges that arose when she was forced to learn how to manage the team that she had hired despite not having any prior experience managing people , and the realization, once Michelle decided she had to begin charging a fee to clients who had previously been handled pro-bono, that nobody actually expected her to work for free, and that her fee increase led to an increase in revenue without an increase in workload.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Michelle shares insight on how she wishes she had been more persuasive in convincing clients to do certain things for themselves and how that built her confidence to be more persistent in following up with clients and prospects (and if she was unsure, to just ask them when they felt it would be OK for her to follow up!), how Michelle finds it energizing and recharging for her to make deep and meaningful connections with clients and prospects (which has helped to carry her through the inevitable business challenges that come along the way), and how Michelle has developed her confidence that, through faith and diligent work, everything will work out, even (and perhaps especially) in situations in which Michelle had no control .
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to purposefully control your growth in order to maximize your own skillsets, how to increase your firm’s revenue without increasing its workload, or how overcoming an aversion to hiring and trusting your team can allow you to focus on the elements of work that actually bring you joy, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Michelle Ogden.
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