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 150th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Tanya Nichols. Tanya is the founder of Align Financial, a hybrid

advisory firm near Duluth, Minnesota that oversees nearly 50 million of assets for 80 client

households. What's unique about Tanya, though, is the way she took a leap last year to start

her own independent advisory firm, after nearly 20 years of working in a larger firm environment,

not because of the opportunity

for more money or independence, but simply because she found a community of others with a similar

growth mindset that would support her in the journey. In this episode, we talk in depth about

Tanya's journey through the advisor industry, from why she left the wirehouse environment to

join a smaller independent firm as there a succession

plan, only to have the plan fail a few years later, to the moment of realization she had that

she needed to go in another direction, that led her to both leave the firm and become a solo

advisor and also divorce her husband all in the span of two weeks. And how she set her current

goal to double her revenue to $1 million

by age 40 while working only 30 hours a week and laughing more with her kids along the way.

We also talk about how Tanya has completely restructured what she does in her advisory firm itself,

from implementing a firm-wide realignment of fees to ensure she was getting paid what she's worth by

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