Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 356th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Sarah-Catherine Gutierrez. Sarah-Catherine is the founder of Aptus Financial, a fee-only financial planning firm based in Little Rock, Arkansas, that is approaching $2M in revenue and works with over 480 client households.
What’s unique about Sarah-Catherine, though, is that despite the common industry belief that the only way to build and scale a firm is through AUM, she has built a multi-advisor firm serving hundreds of clients while operating as a flat-fee advice-only firm … which is expedited by Sarah-Catherine’s focus on building sustainable marketing systems that keep her advisors from being ‘distracted’ by the time-consuming task of prospecting for clients and solely focused on efficiently delivering financial planning to their clients instead.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how, despite some false starts and initially problematic underpricing, Sarah-Catherine intentionally built her financial planning fee to transparently communicate her value and the work she does as a financial advisor while also pricing within a range for her originally accidental (but now fully embraced) niche of recently graduated physicians, how Sarah-Catherine built a trust-based Center-of-Influence and referrals system that is so strong that she no longer has to worry about where the next prospect will come from, and how Sarah-Catherine uses her onboarding process to convert ready-to-act from prospects to fully informed clients with action plans in only 2 calls.
We also talk about why Sarah-Catherine has segmented her planning fees by charging an initial upfront fee for the first year financial plan, decreasing to a lower year-over-year fee for ongoing client service, coupled with a consistent additional end-of-year annual review fee, how the unique challenges of Sarah-Catherine’s niche clientele caused her to build a completely custom financial planning spreadsheet to do her planning work efficiently, and how Sarah-Catherine builds customized cashflow management plans for new physicians planning to understand their current financial situation and their trajectory towards early retirement.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Sarah-Catherine shares how, as a founder, she has learned to get comfortable simply leaning into her instincts, even when she can’t fully back up a decision with numbers, finding her own compass for determining what will best for her clients and the company at large, how Sarah-Catherine’s determination to remain neutral in her marketing, rather than ‘salesy’, has ultimately opened up speaking opportunities and created new prospect pipelines, and why, despite the grueling intensity of deciding to scale her planning business with all the hiring and systems-building it entails, Sarah-Catherine finds it all worthwhile now that she’s on the other side, with a healthy marketing system that means she is no longer worried about where the next new client will come from to cover her growing payroll obligation.
So whether you’re interested in learning how Sarah-Catherine utilizes her touchpoints to help her “guided DIY” clients continue to act, how she manages both the hard dollars of budgeting and soft dollars of future ambitions to help clients both live the lives they want today while also ensuring they can enjoy their future, or why she muscled through the grueling intensity of the early years of scaling a business in order to deliver affordable financial planning to over 30,000 people who wouldn’t be eligible to work with a ‘standard’ financial advisor, then I hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with Sarah-Catherine Gutierrez.
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