Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with

financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial

advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get

insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 44th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Jake Keebler. Jake is the president of Blue Stem Financial Advisors,

an independent R.A based in Champaign, Illinois, that provides a combination of financial

planning investment management and tax preparation with four staff members for nearly 100 clients

using a comprehensive annual retainer model. What's really unique about Jake's business, though,

is that he's actually the next-generation

successor of Blue Stem, having spent the past five years buying out the founding owner, Karen Foke,

while nearly doubling the size of the practice along the way. Oh, and he just turned 30,

which means he actually started this internal succession plan as a buyer when he was just 25.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Blue Stem built a niche focus on serving college professors and administrators, as they are

based in the hometown of the main University of Illinois campus. Why they chose to include tax

preparation as a part of their annual service offering, the structure

of Blue Stem's annual retainer fee model and how it changes from upfront to ongoing, and how

their retainer model structure is allowing them to grow the business serving a substantial

segment of young professionals in Champaign in addition to retirees, and the business

management spreadsheet that Jake uses to monitor and track the key metrics of his advisory firm along the way.

From there, we also talk about the details of the actual succession plan that Jake executed with the founder,

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