Ep 116: Building A Consumer Media And Author Presence To Gain Credibility As A 'Small' Independent Advisor with Harold Evensky
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.8 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2019
⏱️ 104 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My guest today is one of the pioneers of financial planning under the RIA model. Harold Evensky is the co-founder and chairman of Evensky & Katz / Foldes Financial, an independent RIA in South Florida that oversees nearly $1.5 billion in assets under management. With over thirty years of experience in the field, Harold literally wrote the book on taking a holistic, goals-based wealth management approach to portfolio design with his 1997 publication, Wealth Management: The Financial Advisor's Guide to Investing and Managing Client Assets.
In this episode, Harold shares his experience starting an RIA in the early days of the independent advisor movement, before platforms like Schwab Advisor Services even existed. Listen in to learn what he did to help his firm compete against mega wirehouses, how the industry has evolved in the three decades since he started, and what it will take for financial planning to truly be recognized as a profession by the public.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/116
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with |
| 0:07.2 | financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial |
| 0:13.1 | advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight |
| 0:18.8 | from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the |
| 0:22.1 | next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone. |
| 0:28.7 | Welcome to the 116th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast |
| 0:34.8 | is Harold Evansky. Harold is the co-founder and chairman of Evansky and Katz Foldis Financial. |
| 0:41.1 | What's unique about Harold, though, is that he was one of the early pioneers to financial planning under the RA model all the way back in the 1980s and taking a holistic goals-based wealth management approach to portfolio design in the 1990s, having literally written the |
| 0:55.3 | book on it 22 years ago in 1997. In this episode, we talk in depth about what it was like |
| 1:03.0 | to start an RA in the early days of the independent advisor movement before platforms like Schwab |
| 1:08.1 | advisor services even existed. The way Harold hustled with seminar marketing |
| 1:12.6 | up to six nights a week in the early days just to get clients and survive. How Harold engaged |
| 1:18.0 | early on with the media as a means to establish credibility for the firm in its efforts to |
| 1:22.6 | compete against mega wirehouses of the time. And how becoming fee-only in the early 1990s helped the firm to |
| 1:29.3 | differentiate itself, because back then, being a fee-only fiduciary actually was a niche. |
| 1:35.5 | We also talk about how the firm grew and evolved over time, what it was like to transition |
| 1:40.0 | from an advisory practice to a business, how Harold thought through the process of |
| 1:44.4 | introducing next generation partners and beginning to relinquish control of the firm, |
| 1:49.0 | the way Evansky and Katz instituted a formal management committee to separate management |
| 1:53.8 | and ownership of the firm as the number of partners proliferated, and how the firm made an |
| 1:58.8 | all-in bet on the shift from AUM fees to retainer fees, |
| 2:02.5 | and then unwound the entire change and went back to charging AUM fees for wealth management |
... |
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