Ep 218: Jumpstarting Growth By Getting Paid To Market Your Own Expertise with Maura Griffin

Financial Advisor Success

Michael Kitces

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News

4.8 • 696 Ratings

🗓️ 2 March 2021

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Maura Griffin is the founder of Blue Spark Financial, an independent RIA that oversees more than $150 million of assets for nearly 90 clients who are primarily single women making financial decisions on their own for the first time. Maura built her practice from scratch by charging high school parents a flat fee to help them with financial aid planning for their children, which she was then able to turn into established relationships that led to more comprehensive planning relationships.

In this episode, Maura shares how having a financial reserve when she launched her firm was so crucial to give her not only peace of mind and confidence, but also the flexibility to build her business with intention—and without feeling pressured to take on work that she didn’t want. She will also dive into how she used a specific niche to help grow her firm, why she decided to pivot to focus on working with her current base of clients, and why she has made the intentional decision to structure her business as a lifestyle practice despite the naysayers.

For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/218

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with
0:07.1	financial planner, speaker, and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading
0:12.4	financial advisors navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success
0:17.4	and get insight from leading industry consultants about how to break through to the next
0:22.2	level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone.
0:29.0	Welcome to the 218th episode, The Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's podcast is
0:35.2	Moira Griffin. Mora is the founder of Blue Spark Financial,
0:38.5	an independent R.A. with offices in New York and Massachusetts that oversees more than 150 million
0:43.5	of assets for nearly 90 families, most of whom are either divorced or widowed women making
0:48.4	financial decisions on their own for the first time. What's unique about Mora, though,
0:52.9	is how she built her practice from scratch,
0:55.5	not by marketing or financial planning services,
0:57.8	but instead by developing a focused expertise in college aid planning
1:02.0	and charging high school parents a flat fee of $1,000 to help them with their financial
1:06.7	aid planning needs.
1:08.0	And in the process, getting paid for her college planning expertise as a pathway
1:12.1	to establishing relationships that then could turn into comprehensive planning relationships in the
1:16.6	future. In this episode, we talk in depth about how the demand for her college aid planning services
1:23.0	help Mara grow to 15 million in AUM by just the first year alone. The way she systematized her
1:29.1	financial aid planning presentation and deliverables to efficiently serve more than 100 clients
1:33.7	in her first year alone. And how those initial financial planning aid engagements led to the
1:38.5	realization that what she found most gratifying from professional perspective was helping women
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Michael Kitces, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Michael Kitces and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.