How the Affluent Find New Advisors

If you’re looking to increase the number of high-net-worth clients you serve, what you need to do to attract them depends on how old your target market is. First, I’ll share what to do for high-net-worth future clients who are in their fifties and sixties, and then I'll share what you can do now to increase your chances of them wanting to work with you. Then we’ll look at high-net-worth clients who are 45 and younger, and what you can do to work with more of them.

How Do People With High Net Worth Find Their Next Advisor?

I’ll share what we learned from our own findings here at Streamline Financial, and also data from the Oxley Institute where they interviewed hundreds of advisors working with affluent clients. And what we both found out was that affluent 50- and 60-year-olds find new advisors by referrals. So, that's not a surprise, but later in this post I'll share with you what we've done to get these referrals at scale–and it's not by asking current clients for them.

Next, what about affluent people who are under 45? They find new advisors by pulling out their phone or pulling out their computer and searching online. That's the number one way that they find new advisors. This is good info to know, but it's useless unless we do something with it. Just like reading a practice management book is good, but it's useless unless we implement something that we've learned in our business to make it better. So, what should we be doing with this information about affluent prospects?

Targeting the Under-45 Market

If your target client is 45 or younger, it's important to have an online presence. You don't have to rank first on page one of Google. But you do need to have something that prospective clients can see where they get to know you before they actually reach out to you. Are you doing anything right now where that's possible? Where they can actually see you or read about you and get to know how you think?

The first thing that worked for us in this way, beginning a couple years ago, it really took the least amount of time investment, but gave us the greatest return. And that was posting regular content to LinkedIn. We aimed for just once a week, and after a few months, we started receiving more connection requests and private messages. The thing that we learned here was that consistency is the main thing that will work in your favor, even if you're not seeing results right away.

For Prospective 50- and 60-Year-Old Clients

When 50- and 60-year-olds are looking for a new advisor, searching online is their second-most used method. But number one is still referrals–they're asking their family and their friends. But we noticed that when advisors increase their online presence, it also increases the number of referrals they get.

As an example: we started with LinkedIn, but I wanted to try video and get better at video, so we started a YouTube channel for Streamline Financial in 2020. Shortly after that, we started taking with prospective clients who were coming directly from watching those YouTube videos. In our first meetings they told us that they actually forwarded some of our videos to friends who are close to retirement too. That kind of blew my mind when I first heard it. They weren’t clients, they were not working with us, and they didn't even know me yet. They just knew me through a screen. But they were already sharing and spreading the word about Streamline Financial, which was pretty amazing.

The reason why they were able to do that is because it’s so easy to just click a button and share versus having a phone call or sharing in some verbal way. Even though it’s just clicking a button and sharing a video with someone, it means a lot more coming from a friend than if it was a video popping up on their homepage of YouTube or something like that.

Focus On One Thing

Based on our experience, I think you can just focus on one thing to increase the chances of affluent clients working with you in the future. That thing is to increase your online presence which will in turn increase the number of referrals that you get.

And if you'd like a simple way to increase and communicate your value to prospective clients, check out the free Value Formula Training linked here. It’s a video I created that’s about 15 minutes long. There is a little bit of time commitment, but it can really change your business. It has for us!