Case Study #8: 30-Year Veteran

Background

“My Altius coach was my manager early in my career. He was the best manager I’ve ever had — and I’ve been in this business over 30 years. When I heard he started a training and coaching firm, I signed up right away. I’ve now been working with him for over 4 years.”

Goals and Challenges

“My partner and I moved our business from another wirehouse in January, 2009. It was a difficult time to move our business given market conditions. We also had some longstanding challenges to overcome. Over time, we met our goals. Altius was a significant participant in that process.

Beyond the transition period, we wanted to build a plan that focused on growth. Initially this was a subjective goal, however, Altius stepped in and helped us quantify our goals so we could track our progress. My partner and I are now committed to a 15% year-over-year growth. Years ago this felt like an unrealistic goal. With Altius’ guidance we met the initial year’s goal and continued to track similarly in subsequent years. In fact, we’ve even exceeded that goal once. We find tremendous value in being held accountable.

Tactics

“Altius provided us with a solid, practical and candid assessment of our practice. Every meeting begins with a review of our progress then we refine or create a very specific game plan for the upcoming month.

Our primary growth tactics have included: acquiring assets held away, implementing niche marketing and leveraging social networks.”

Performance and Practice Changes

“In general, we are up 17.25 % in revenue; 38% in assets; and are on target to double our business within five years.

We have done an excellent job at acquiring assets held away. We’ve also had excellent success in niche marketing. For example, we are building strong relationships with medical professionals and have gathered additional assets from that market. Our discovery process has helped us cross-sell and expand our client relationships into other products such as lending.

Altius has also helped the team to develop a clear understanding of our game plan, in particular, their roles and responsibilities.  As a result, everyone is on board with the same strategy. We are very focused and have a greater sense of urgency. We are also consistently adding to our team as we grow.”

Advice to FAs Considering Coaching

“Altius Learning coaches have been high-producing FAs. They’ve also managed some of the top professionals in our industry. Their experience has allowed them to collect a library of best practices that have been invaluable to us. We’ve used benchmarks attributed to million-dollar plus advisors as a way to gauge goals, strategies and useful metrics.

When you are with your Altius coach, you will receive complete and undivided attention. Our coach has understood us from an inside-out perspective . He’s had an uncanny ability to identify core issues quickly; and because he knows the business so well and has such a command of the financial advisor world, he has quickly diagnosed our problems and identified solutions. It would have been difficult for us to reach our goals without Altius.”