Welcome back to the 260th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is David Ortiz. David is the founder of Financial Chef, an independent RIA operating as a lifestyle practice, serving clients in southern Florida. What’s unique about David, though, is the way he combines his experience as a classically trained chef with the growth of his advisory firm, which now includes driving a Sprinter van with a full kitchen, so he can travel to a wider range of clientele across South Florida, to cook custom meals for them and then provide financial advice while they eat their freshly prepared food together.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how David grew his advisory firm by leveraging his training as a chef, first by building relationships with local charities, where he would provide in-house cooking for a party of 10 as a silent auction offering to get access to high-value prospects who are affluent enough to bid thousands of dollars on his donated chef services, how David then built an office space with a professional kitchen where the timing of client meetings was based on the available breakfast, lunch, and dinner sittings that restaurants use, and why David ultimately decided to make his cooking plus advice services more mobile by buying the van with the kitchen so that he could bring the food directly to his clients in what David calls the Ritz-Carlton of food trucks.
We also talk about how David has evolved his financial planning services for clients, including how David has largely eschewed relying on traditional planning software and instead, built his value proposition directly around the ongoing and never-ending financial planning tasks that his clients need his help to implement, how David built his own custom portals for each client through Microsoft SharePoint to help clients track their financial planning progress over time, and why David has decided to evolve his business model towards charging ongoing planning fees as a percentage of client income for his financial planning task support, in addition to AUM fees where his clients need their portfolios managed.
And be certain to listen to the end where David shares his own journey through the advice business from how he made the transition from being a chef and doing a brief stint at a software company before getting started as a life insurance agent, why David ultimately decided to leave the broker-dealer world and structure his firm as an independent RIA instead, and why David believes that a chef who cooks for his clients in addition to providing them financial advice has been so effective at deepening his client relationships.
So whether you’re interested in learning more about why David decided to join his talents as a chef and as a financial advisor into a successful business, why he opts for an almost subscription-style fee model, or how he designs his financial plans with a task-oriented approach, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast.
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