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 163rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is

Michael Genoa. Michael is a financial advisor and program manager for SoCal Wealth Management, a hybrid advisory firm in Southern California that oversees 260 million of assets under management for nearly 1,800 clients.

What's unique about Michael, though, is the way he's been able to build SoCal wealth management under the umbrella of the credit union of Southern California,

which itself has nearly 1.6 billion of credit union assets, serving almost 120,000 members across 18 branch locations,

and feeds a continuous flow of prospect referrals to Michael's advisory firm.

With the caveat that is part of the credit union, they have to take

every client that is referred to them. In this episode, we talk in depth about the unique

structure of credit unions as customer, or rather member-owned financial institutions,

and how member-centric culture of credit unions can be so complementary to the

client-centric culture of advisory firms. The way that credit union of Southern California structure

is its referral program and trains its member service officers across branches to identify members

with applying needs and steer them towards SoCal wealth management at a pace of nearly three new clients per week.

And the way SoCal wealth structures its offering on the LPL platform to keep it efficient enough to run this kind of high-volume client business.

We also talk about the way that Michael's firm uses an internal team member supporting the financial advisors to both

set initial appointments with referrals, but also to help screen them to ensure they're a fit

for the firm in the first place. SoCal Welts financial planning process in their two-meeting

approach that delivers the plan interactively with Money Guide Pro, not only to engage clients, but

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