Becoming the CEO of Your Firm - Business Growth through Educational Strategy

With over 15 years of educational marketing experience, Rachel Namoff, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Arapaho Asset Management, has an incredible depth of real-world experience when it comes to using educational marketing to grow a business. She shared some of that experience with us in our latest Leading with Education webinar, offering useful tips and tricks any advisor can implement to start maximizing their firm’s growth potential today. 

Relationships Matter

Throughout her talk, Rachel stressed the importance of fostering and maintaining good venue relationships.It can be challenging for new advisors to identify the right venue for their educational marketing needs. This is a critical step of the process because starting that relationship off the right way is key to long-term success. In order to approach this challenge, Rachel advises a switching of hats, so to speak, between financial advisor and financial educator. 

“What opens the door with educators [venues] is a different skill set than a financial advisor has when working with clients. When you’re a financial advisor and you’re solving clients’ needs, there’s a sales piece in some ways. . . . When approaching an administrator at an educational venue, you still need to identify their pain points and how you’re going to solve that problem for them, but it’s a nuanced conversation that’s different than when you’re dealing with a client.” 

She stresses that you want to find the sweet spot for the educational venue where the prospect/student, the college, and you as the advisor will all win. Ideally what you’re “selling” to the college is how they are going to look great by allowing you to operate at their institution. When they enable you to teach your course you are in turn netting them new prospective students as a legitimate, financial education resource.  

Remember to Keep it Organized 

As Rachel helped make evident, the organizational structure of your firm plays a key role in keeping your team highly effective - helping to ensure your resources aren’t spread too thin, allowing you to focus on what matters most. 

Part of this comes down to being able and willing to pivot as needed. The longer you are in this industry, the more things are going to change around you - as such, it’s crucial to re-assess your firm’s procedures to ensure you are creating the most effective environment for success. 

Another part of organization comes down to how you delineate tasks across your firm. Rachel shares how as a leader she took on a lot of “smaller” tasks during the pandemic to enable her advisors to keep doing what they do best. 

Overall she stressed how it’s important to check-in with the other advisors in your firm and see what’s working and what’s not. Don’t approach it with a “king of the castle” mentality - instead use a common approach where everyone can come together as individuals to do their best work.  

Driving Client Engagement with the Right Motivation

Another great piece of advice Rachel shared with us has to do with the type of motivation you use in prospect/client interactions. 

“How you keep client’s is based on a client’s motivation - and that goes back to the psychology. So, if I’m internally motivated to have something, be something, do something, it’s going to be really sticky. If I’m externally motivated, it’s not nearly as strong of a decider in terms of making the commitment. Sometimes, this is referred to as pull vs. push - but it comes down to that we want clients to make the decision to work with us from a point of internal motivation.”

She goes on to share how this approach to client motivation makes marketing needs really clear in terms of finding ways to create value for clients that make them not only want to work with you initially, but never leave. Educational marketing and being a financial educator, creates this kind of sticky, internalized motivation for prospects. 

Don’t forget to keep up to date with our Leading with Education Series to learn even more about how our advisors use education to grow their practices and create meaningful client relationships!