Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 404th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Ann Garcia. Ann is a partner of Independent Progressive Advisors, an RIA based in Portland, Oregon, that oversees approximately $115 million in assets under management for 120 client households.
What’s unique about Ann, though, is how she crafted a nationally recognized expertise in college financial planning, and the ways that specialization has evolved as Ann’s advisory business itself has evolved its focus on serving mid-career professionals balancing the competing priorities of saving for college and their own retirements.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about Ann’s path to becoming a recognized college planning expert, which started by becoming the in-house expert within her firm by researching answers to common client questions about funding college for their children, how Ann leveraged the emails she had already been sending to clients to answer their college funding questions to compose the initial articles of a blog on college planning (and how the blog’s singular focus on its college planning specialization allowed Ann to relatively quickly earn acknowledgement and hyperlink traffic back from national publications like the The New York Times), and how Ann has further leveraged this expertise and media exposure to publish a book and build an online course on college planning, allowing her to serve families that she knows need her help but aren’t necessarily a fit for her advisory firm’s core wealth management services.
We also talk about how Ann’s media appearances and college planning expertise have helped her attract clients and grow her firm by serving mid-career professionals balancing college planning with other financial goals (to the point where Ann and her business partner are navigating capacity constraints as they reach 120 client households), how Ann started out on her own as an advisor by buying the practice of a retiring advisor (retaining all but one of her clients in the process) and using that as the foundation to build the practice Ann ultimately wanted it to become, and how Ann’s decision early on in her career to take as many prospect meetings as possible, even if she knew they wouldn’t likely become clients, helped her get in the repetitions necessary to refine her communication and sales process to the point where now prospects who are a good fit almost always become clients after meeting with her.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Ann shares her advice for families going through the college planning process, including the importance of starting these conversations with kids early in their high school years to set expectations for how much the family can afford to pay for college in the first place, how Ann’s volunteer service as a NAPFA study group leader not only helped her connect with advisors with a wide range of experiences, but also enabled her to build a valuable network of COIs in her local community to support her clients, and why Ann decided to leave a firm that did offer her career growth and prestige opportunities to start out on her own instead… so that she could work exclusively with clients that she wanted to work with, who shared her own values.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to build nationally recognized expertise in a client niche, helping client families plan for college, or how acquiring a retiring advisor’s firm can jump-start an advisor’s own practice, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Ann Garcia.
