Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 401st episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Zack Hubbard. Zack is the Director of Financial Planning and Participant Engagement of Greenspring Advisors, an RIA based in Towson, Maryland, that manages $2 billion of private wealth assets under management for 1,300 client households and advises on an additional $5 billion in retirement plan assets.
What’s unique about Zack, though, is how he has built a financial wellness offering that both profitably serves employees at businesses that utilize their fiduciary 401(k) services with not just self-serve technology but outright one-on-one financial advice to plan participants… and provides a stream of referrals for his firm’s private wealth services.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Zack views fiduciary financial wellness to 401(k) plan participants as a 3-tiered offering consisting of education, one-on-one advice, and implementation support, how Zack’s firm is able to generate incredibly strong email open rates of 75%–90%, and click-through rates of 40%–50%, on the (hyper-targeted) educational content his firm provides (with short-form videos having particularly high click-through rates), and why Zack decided to outsource the implementation of their financial planning advice– including on insurance, estate planning, college and student loan planning, and debt counseling – rather than sell products, not only to maintain the company’s status as a fee-only firm, but also to avoid conflicts of interest that could violate his firm’s fiduciary responsibilities under ERISA as a provider to 401(k) plans.
We also talk about how Zack’s firm has been able to profitably provide and scale one-on-one advice to employees who are a part of the financial wellness offering they provide to 401(k) plans, including by holding shorter meetings that really focus in to address these clients’ immediate concerns (rather than longer meetings being more comprehensive than what clients really asked for), how Zack has developed a career track where newer advisors meet directly with these employee clients, to the tune of 400+ meetings per year, allowing them to quickly build their advisor skills through getting so many client meeting ‘at bats’, and how Zack’s firm leverages the trust built in these on-on-one meetings to convert employees of participating companies into traditional financial planning clients when they ultimately leave their company or decide to retire.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Zack shares why he believes serving the employees of business-owner clients through financial wellness programs can help advisors build loyalty with those business owners themselves, how Zack decided he didn’t want to be a client-facing advisor himself and instead pursued a path where he could be in charge of growing a line of business and employee training and development, and why Zack sees his financial wellness offering not only as an opportunity to serve more clients compared to a traditional planning approach, but also provides an alternative to the traditional “eat what you kill” approach for bringing new advisors into the industry, instead focusing on opportunities for newer advisors to learn and grow with a more stable compensation structure and development path instead.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to offer a profitable financial wellness offering, how to convert retirement plan participants to full-time financial planning clients, or how advisors can leverage financial wellness programs to better serve their business owner clients, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Zack Hubbard.
