Ep 453: Improving Efficiency By Turning Client Meetings Into Working Sessions So There Is Less Follow-Up To Manage with Becky Walsh
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.8 • 696 Ratings
🗓️ 2 September 2025
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Delivering financial planning efficiently doesn’t have to mean compromising on depth or personalization. This episode explores how a “working session” model can streamline the client experience, reduce prep and follow-up time, and still create space for thoughtful, relationship-driven planning.
Becky Walsh is the founder of Oak Maple Finance, an RIA based in Burlington, Vermont, that oversees approximately $80 million in AUM for 75 client households.
Listen in as Becky shares how she structures her onboarding into a six-month planning sprint with four real-time working sessions, drastically reducing the hours spent outside of client meetings. We discuss how this approach helps her serve Earners Wanting Advice Now (EWAN) clients with a flat complexity-based fee while maintaining a personalized experience. Becky also explains how she uses software tools like Elements and Money Quotient to assess a client’s financial picture and mindset, how she tailors service tiers after the initial planning "sprint" to match ongoing client needs, and why the support of a trusted peer study group has been a powerful driver in her own professional growth.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/453
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 |
| 0:21.9 | next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsis. Welcome, everyone. |
| 0:29.0 | Welcome to the 453rd episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest on today's |
| 0:34.1 | podcast is Becky Walsh. Becky is the founder of Oak Maple Finance, an RIA based in Burlington, Vermont, that oversees |
| 0:41.0 | approximately $80 million in assets under management for 75 client households. |
| 0:45.9 | What's unique about Becky, though, is how she conducts meetings with new clients as |
| 0:49.7 | working sessions, where she gathers and analyzes client data in real time, reducing the amount of time |
| 0:54.9 | spent on prep and follow-up work before and after each meeting. In this episode, we talk in depth |
| 1:00.4 | about how Becky organizes her new client onboarding process into a six-month planning sprint that |
| 1:05.7 | includes six meetings, with the first four meetings being work sessions requiring little work |
| 1:09.8 | outside of the meeting itself, |
| 1:11.4 | how Becky has been able to shorten the time required for remaining between meeting tasks by |
| 1:15.7 | leveraging templates and common CRM workflows and how charging a flat complexity-based fee for this |
| 1:20.9 | planning process and the time saved from conducting much of the data gathering and planning work |
| 1:25.1 | during meetings allows her to serve so-called earners wanting advice now, who might not have amass sufficient assets to pay an asset-based |
| 1:31.8 | fee. We also talk about how Becky's working meetings also enable her to gain a better understanding |
| 1:37.4 | of a client's financial literacy and organizational skills, allowing her to adjust her expectations |
| 1:42.1 | and communication accordingly, how Becky uses tools |
| 1:45.0 | from money quotient to more efficiently assess her client's qualitative relationship with money, |
... |
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