Ep 009: From Medicine to Holistic Financial Planning Using A Complexity-Based Retainer Model with Carolyn McClanahan

Financial Advisor Success

Michael Kitces

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News

4.8 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2017

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today on Financial Advisor Success, I’m excited to host Dr. Carolyn McClanahan of Life Planning Partners. Carolyn is a physician and financial planner based out of Jacksonville, Florida, where her truly holistic ensemble practice works with 80 clients and maintains more than $1 million a year of stable recurring income.

In this episode, Carolyn lays out the infrastructure & beliefs of her firm and shares the client standards document that ensures she only works with considerate, responsive, all-around awesome clients.

Carolyn also talks about how she adjusts her complexity-based fee for each client, why she doesn’t want to grow beyond 100 client families, the hard lessons she learned about hiring, and the parallels she sees between medicine and financial planning. We wrap up with a discussion of her new company that plans to make it easier for financial planners to navigate working with aging clients to ensure their long term financial stability.

Get the full show notes and transcript for this episode at: https://www.kitces.com/9

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner,
0:08.4	speaker and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors
0:13.6	navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from leading
0:19.2	industry consultants about how to break through to the
0:22.0	next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.
0:29.2	Welcome to the ninth episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast is
0:34.8	Carolyn McClanahan. Carolyn runs a very unique advisory firm out of
0:38.5	Jacksonville, Florida. While she does both comprehensive financial planning and investment management,
0:43.2	she does not charge an AUM fee at all. Instead, Carolyn uses a complexity-based retainer fee for her
0:49.1	financial planning centric services, jarring nearly $1 million a year of stable recurring revenue while serving
0:55.2	80 clients with three staff members on her team.
0:58.1	In this episode, Carolyn, or I should say Dr. McClanahan, shares how she transitioned into
1:03.4	financial planning from being an emergency medicine doctor, the details of how her advisory firm
1:08.2	is now structured, and the breadth of those financial planning services that she offers for an average retainer fee of almost $10,000 a year.
1:15.7	Carolyn also shares a unique client engagement standards document that she created, which
1:20.8	articulates both the exact service standards her firm commits to when working with clients,
1:25.4	right down to the speed that phone calls and emails
1:27.9	will be returned, but also sets forth the requirements that her clients have to follow just to be
1:33.1	clients, including following her investment process, being respectful to her team, and being
1:38.2	good clients who return her phone calls and emails in a timely manner.
1:42.5	And Carolyn was actually kind enough to share
1:44.3	a copy of her engagement standards for all the financial advisor success podcast listeners,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Kitces, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Kitces and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.