Practicing financial advisors grow their AUM with financial education

Many financial planners and advisors are initially uneasy about the notion of teaching a financial education course in a classroom setting (or virtually, through a video conferencing platform). Isn’t this sort of role better suited to an educator? What if you’ve never managed a classroom before? How do you turn years of professional expertise into an accessible lesson plan that attendees can take home?

These concerns are common and perfectly understandable. Stepping outside of familiar roles gives everyone pause. However, the truth is that you don’t need to have classroom experience to offer financial education to your clients. 

Your career has prepared you for this

To begin with, financial advisors are natural teachers. The work you do with clients every day is itself a form of mentorship and education. Translating these skills into a digital or in-person classroom setting may be easier than you may think. 

Mark, a financial advisor and principal of his own practice in a growing suburb, is familiar with the initial apprehension. His team had misgivings at first, but he felt that “I had to do something. I didn’t know if the online courses would work, and I was concerned.” 

After teaching a two-class course with ten attendees, seven of them booked follow-up appointments. Five of those prospects eventually closed and became clients. Mark’s hesitance to offer financial education services quickly blossomed into comfort and appreciation. “Learn by getting one or two of these sessions under your belt,” he says of the adjustment. “You need to raise your enthusiasm and have more interesting stories to keep these audiences engaged.”

A turnkey program equips you with everything you need

Teaching a financial education course doesn’t require in-depth familiarity with lesson planning or pedagogy. An established program can give financial advisors access to FINRA-reviewed, fully compliant materials and a proven framework for success in the classroom. Financial education courses from FMT provide our instructors with:

• Proven courses with robust syllabi and speaker notes
• All attendee materials and workbooks for them to take home
• Access to instructor training (for deepening engagement and closing new business)
• Guidance as you define a marketing strategy for your course
• A platform for collecting RSVPs and course registrations
• A fully reserved, exclusive marketing area

These resources from a turnkey program make it easy to get started and succeed in using the course to grow your business. All of our courses at FMT have been carefully designed to be intuitive and accessible to attendees, comprehensive in subject matter, and user-friendly for instructors. 

It’s not just teaching — you’re attracting new business

Our courses have demonstrated strong business growth results across years of offerings by a diverse range of instructors who are practicing financial planners and advisors. 

Teaching even a single course with the FMT platform can have an immediate impact on your client base. A typical course brings in an average of 17 attendees, 10 follow-up appointments, $2.5M from 4 new clients, and $4M in projected AUM.

We’ve seen these results for more than 20 years, even for advisors who begin without any experience in an educational setting. If you’ve been considering the possibility of offering financial education to your clients, it’s never been easier to get started. Feel free to reach out to FMT with any questions you may have about leveraging a financial education program to grow your business. We’re here to help!

This article was originally published in May, 2022. Updated February, 2023.