Ep 420: Making Financial Planning More Repeatable Without Losing The Customization Where Clients Prioritize What Matters Most with Michelle Underwood Gass
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.8 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2025
⏱️ 90 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Michelle Underwood Gass is the Founding Principal of Paradigm Advisors, an RIA based out of Dallas that oversees approximately $110 million in assets under management for 80 client households. What’s unique about Michelle is how she developed a structured meeting process to guide new clients through her in-depth planning system, ensuring a standardized experience while retaining the flexibility to customize each client’s financial plan, prioritizing their unique needs and goals.
Listen in as Michelle shares her 5-part planning process, beginning with a “Get to Know You” meeting that incorporates Life Planning exercises to uncover client priorities and ensure a mutual fit, followed by a tech-enabled “Uncluttering” process to streamline document collection and onboarding. She explains how her “Intrinsic Discovery” and “Discovering Opportunities” meetings prioritize key planning areas, avoiding overwhelm for busy working-age clients, while tools like eMoney’s Decision Center and Hubly workflow management software support efficient plan implementation. Michelle also discusses her combined flat planning and AUM-based fee structure that allows her to serve high-earning professionals and hedge fund veterans, and how launching her financial planning business brought her a renewed sense of purpose after stepping away from managing a hedge fund.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/420
Transcript
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| 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. |
| 0:29.1 | Welcome to the 420th episode of the Financial Advisor's Success podcast. My guest on today's |
| 0:34.4 | podcast is Michelle Underwood Gas. Michelle is the founding principle of paradigm advisors, an RAA based in Dallas, Texas, that oversees approximately 110 million in assets under management for 80 client households. |
| 0:46.2 | What's unique by Michelle, though, is the way that she created a structured meeting process to navigate around the places where new clients often get stuck, standardizing their experience |
| 0:55.1 | and navigating through her deep planning process, but still retaining a way to ensure that |
| 0:59.4 | each client's plan, focus, and implementation is really customized to their needs and prioritize |
| 1:04.1 | for what they want to tackle first and foremost. |
| 1:07.3 | In this episode, we talk in depth about Michelle's five-part planning process, which starts with a |
| 1:12.2 | get-to-know-you meeting with prospects that includes some life planning exercises to both help |
| 1:17.0 | Michelle understand what the client's real issues are and help the client understand Michelle's |
| 1:20.9 | planning approach and whether a planning relationship would be a good mutual fit. |
| 1:25.2 | How Michelle begins onboarding new clients using a tech-enabled |
| 1:28.1 | uncluttering process that helps reduce friction in clients collecting and organizing documents |
| 1:33.8 | and information. And how Michelle holds what she calls an intrinsic discovery meeting to go |
| 1:38.9 | deeper and really gets the heart of client's true values and goals. We also talk about how Michelle then engages in a |
| 1:45.8 | discovering opportunities meeting to highlight particular key planning opportunities for clients |
| 1:50.4 | to pursue first, rather than just giving them a long list of recommendations that can overwhelm |
| 1:55.6 | her busy working age client base and lets them focus on the few issues that are most important to them. |
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