Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner, speaker and consultant Michael Kitsas, 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 56th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Cheryl Garrett. Sherrill is the founder of the Garrett Planning Network,

a financial advisor support network for fee-only RAAs with a focus on bringing financial planning

to the middle market by making it available on an hourly as-needed basis. What's unique about

Cheryl, though, is that what started out as a very unique business model in the late 1990s turned

out to be so popular that it attracted other

financial advisors to her to emulate the model. And as a result, what started out as something that

Cheryl wanted to do for her own clients turned into a network of several hundred advisors

all delivering the same hourly model in their own local markets. In this episode, Cheryl shares

her own path through the financial planning industry,

how she struggled early on in a broker dealer that required her to cold call and sell products,

how she dropped her FINRA licenses and shifted to an early fee-only R-A, then picked her FINRA licenses

back up for a second time for another broker-dealer firm, only to then drop them again by

transitioning once more finally into the fee-only channel for good. up for a second time for another broker-dealer firm, only to then drop them again by transitioning

once more finally into the fee-only channel for good, albeit by becoming a partner in a new fee-only

RAA, only to discover that that partnership wasn't going to work, which is what ultimately led her

to finally start her own firm a full 10-plus years into her career. In addition, Cheryl shares what it took

for her to finally launch the Garrett Planning Network, what she's learned about the success and the

challenges of the hourly model for financial planning, why referrals from other advisors can

actually be one of the best ways to build an hourly practice, and how, just as with any other

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