Success Lessons from an RIA
on Nov 04, 2011
I met with the founder of a successful RIA practice last week. His business is over 20 years old with about 1% client attrition (stunningly good to me). As we spoke about how his business arrived here today and what may help grow the practice, he had three reasons for his continued success.
- Start small and prove performance – He mentioned that he’d often start with small slices of investable assets; something like $10,000. And over time, he’d ask if the client was happy with his firm’s performance and similarly content with performance of her other assets. Often she’d say yes about his firm and no about other firms. Then she’d move additional assets to his firm.
- Out-service the competition – He believes that most of his competition spends too little time with clients. He goes to great lengths to visit each client quarterly.
- Knowledge versus expertise – He built his firm to be knowledgeable about broad market situations and events, and to have extremely specific expertise in one investment strategy.
It’s always great to re-learn those lessons. They apply pretty closely to product manufacturers as well.