Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 430th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is AJ Ayers. AJ is the co-founder of Brooklyn Fi, an RIA based in Brooklyn, New York but operating as a fully remote business, that oversees $370 million in assets under management for more than 400 client households.
What’s unique about AJ, though, is how she and her business partner have navigated the hiring and training, and system and process challenges, that come from very rapidly scaling an advisory firm business from scratch to $5 million of revenue in just 7 years.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how AJ and her firm have navigated periods of rapid client headcount growth (with the firm averaging 14 new clients per month in 2021 while having just three planners on staff at the time), how AJ decided to hire rapidly to meet this brisk new client demand (by leveraging LinkedIn’s Recruiter platform to actively reach out to potential candidates rather than wait for them to respond to a passive job listing), and how AJ’s firm created a training program to bring new hires up to speed more quickly on serving clients in the firm’s hyper-specialized equity compensation niche (by incorporating internally produced videos, external coursework, and the opportunity to sit in on client meetings alongside BrooklynFI’s lead advisors very early in the new advisor’s tenure with the firm).
We also talk about how serving the equity compensation niche has allowed AJ and her firm to rapidly attract new clients and then efficiently systematize its planning process and give its advisors the chance to get lots of ‘at bats’ early on working with its target clients, how AJ and her partner further streamlined their firm’s planning process by creating a software tool called Gemifi to extract data from a client’s grant award statements and then analyze the equity compensation history to offer planning scenarios for how to handle their equity grants, and how AJ has developed a three-part fee model (including a complexity-based planning fee, an AUM fee on investible assets, and a fee for tax-preparation) to ensure that fees best align to each client’s unique needs and the value her firm provides in each these areas (and ensure sufficient revenue per client when some of the firm’s clients have not yet experienced a liquidity event that would allow them to be served profitably under an AUM-only model).
And be certain to listen to the end, where AJ shares how she and her business partner decided to delegate responsibility for day-to-day firm operations (allowing them to dial back their own founder work schedules to two days per week), why AJ decided to hire an HR professional to serve as a “people person” who could help build company culture in a virtual working environment (including by hosting regular in-person retreats that the whole team flies in for), and how AJ experienced impostor syndrome a couple years into her time in the industry (as she realized how much there was to learn about the equity compensation niche) but tackled it head-on by earning a series of certifications relevant to her niche and trying to get even more client meetings to build experience working with her firm’s ideal client.
So whether you’re interested in learning about how AJ integrated delegation and training into the infrastructure of her firm, how AJ tackled a complex corner of the industry as a career changer, or how to work scalably in a niche where the clients’ day-to-day circumstances are always changing, then we hope you enjoy this episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, with AJ Ayers.
Read More…
