Welcome back to the 376th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Eric Simonson. Eric is the Founder & CEO of Abundo Wealth, an Advice-Only RIA based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that oversees $600M in assets under advisement for 420 client households.
What’s unique about Eric, though, is that Abundo has grown its base of 420 clients, and is on pace for well over $1M of revenue in 2024, despite having launched barely 4 years ago… with an “advice-only” business model of providing comprehensive financial planning for $189/month and helping clients implement themselves, that has generated so much word-of-mouth that they’re now bringing in more than 30 new clients, per month, and staffing up on salaried financial advisors to meet the demand.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Eric allows his clients to maintain control over their investments but to ensure they actually implement has built out guided tutorials of how, exactly, to trade their investments across most of the major brokerage and 401(k) platforms, how Abundo has arranged their team’s capacity to balance each advisor’s workload and set the metrics for how far in advance of their continued growth they need to hire new advisors in order to avoid advisor burn-out, and how, primarily through referrals coupled with extremely affordable rates to reach a segment of consumers that may not want to relinquish control to a ‘traditional’ AUM advisor, Abundo is now bringing in almost 30 new client households per month without requiring any business development from their salaried advisors.
We also talk about Eric’s journey in trying to find the right fee structure for Abundo, which has evolved from what was originally an income-based fee, to a fixed rate of $89/month for individuals versus $139/month for couples, finally landing on their current $189/month fee (which they determined will still allow enough profit margin to hire the required new team members to sustain their growth), the cadence of 4 meetings in the first year and 3 check-in meetings in subsequent years that Eric has implemented to maintain his client service model, and how Eric has grown to enjoy the entrepreneurial side of building the firm, but struggles with how those requirements are sometimes coupled with a feeling of guilt over not having more time to spend with clients as well as the business grows.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Eric shares how even though the firm has been incredibly successful in growing through referrals and various find-an-advisor directories, he thinks the next big marketing opportunity is to lean into social media (especially video), the way Eric got comfortable being his authentic self and leaning into the niche his firm serves (even if it means figuring out how to build solutions that don’t yet exist), and how the opportunity to be an entrepreneur and create something new and different is what carried Eric through the challenging early days of the business where he knew he could get a good salaried advisor job for a much higher income, but instead stuck with Abundo even when he couldn’t afford to pay himself a salary, because he was so energized by the vision of what he was building.
So, whether you’re interested in learning about how to effectively evolve in the journey of finding the right fee structure for your firm, how to keep your hiring practice far enough ahead of your workload capacity to avoid overwhelming your advisors, how to stay true to your authentic self through keeping a finger on the pulse of your firm’s strengths and niches, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Eric Simonson.
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