Ep 158: Leveraging Outsourcers To Go From Employee To Independent Without Building It All Yourself with Steph Bruno
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.8 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2020
⏱️ 99 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Steph Bruno is the founder of Sea to Peak Financial Advisors, an independent RIA that oversees nearly $70 million in assets under management for 45 affluent clients. Today Steph joins the show to discuss the process of branching out and starting her own independent firm after spending 15 years as an employee for another firm.
Listen in as she explains why she decided to take the leap from a stable paycheck to building her own business from scratch, as well as how she rebooted her marketing in the process. You’ll learn what made her decide to hire a personal coach to help her work through the difficult first few years of running her own business, how she integrates life planning conversations into her planning process, and what she’s choosing to focus on now that she is running her own firm.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/158
Transcript
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| 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. |
| 0:29.1 | Welcome to the 158th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's |
| 0:34.6 | podcast is Steph Bruno. Steph is the founder of C-2-Peek Financial Advisors, an independent RIA with offices based |
| 0:41.3 | in Seattle and Denver that oversees nearly 70 million in assets in our management for 45 |
| 0:45.8 | affluent clients. |
| 0:47.4 | What's unique about Steph, though, is that she transitioned to launching her own independent |
| 0:51.5 | firm only after a 15-year career as an employee in large |
| 0:54.9 | and mid-sized financial services firms and recognized that she didn't want to manage the infrastructure |
| 1:00.0 | of actually establishing and running a new firm by herself, so she found an outsourcing partner |
| 1:04.7 | that from the start would work with her to provide that structure so she could simply |
| 1:08.9 | focus on what she wanted to focus on, |
| 1:13.9 | serving the client she wanted to serve the way she wanted to serve them. |
| 1:19.6 | In this episode, we talk in depth about what led Steph to take the leap and walk away from a stable employee paycheck to build her own firm from scratch, how she initially tucked under another |
| 1:23.9 | established hybrid advisory firm for support to grow. The realization that owning her |
| 1:28.7 | own clients meant she'd have to market for her own clients, and that if she was going to market |
| 1:32.2 | herself anyway, she may as well break out entirely on her own, and why Steph decided to hire a |
| 1:37.1 | personal coach to help her, not when many other advisors do, which is once they hit a capacity |
| 1:41.7 | while I need to figure out how to best structure the practice going forward, but instead to get coaching support right from the start to help give her |
... |
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