Ep 487: Building The Team And Tech To Serve Thousands Of (Advice-Only) Clients Efficiently with Lori Atwood
Financial Advisor Success
Michael Kitces
4.7 • 719 Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 90 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Growing a client base from the hundreds into the thousands requires both tech and talent. Today's guest discusses how she's done both in order to serve more than 3,000 advice-only clients over the past three years.
Lori Atwood is the founder of Fearless Finance. In this episode, she shares why she built her own internal planning software platform to meet the needs of her ideal target clients, how her "hub-and-spoke" advisor structure helps maintain culture and consistency across her firm, and how she spends 18% of her revenue on client acquisition yet ends up with a per-client acquisition cost that's lower than the industry average. Lori also discusses how prospects (who sometimes use AI tools to answer personal finance questions) often come to her for "confirmation, not information" on their financial situations and how she's found it gratifying to be the first call her (largely working-age) clients make when they face an unexpected financial contingency and to be able to provide them with meaningful solutions.
For show notes and more visit: https://www.kitces.com/487
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 |
| 0:13.5 | navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight |
| 0:18.5 | 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. Welcome to |
| 0:29.5 | the 487th episode of the Financial Advisor Success podcast. My guest on today's podcast is Lori Atwood. |
| 0:36.7 | Lori is the founder of Fearless Finance, an RIA based in Washington, D.C., that has served almost 3,000 client households over the past three years on an advice-only, predominantly hourly fee basis. |
| 0:47.8 | What's unique about Lori, though, is how she built an internal planning software platform to meet the needs of her ideal target client alongside a team |
| 0:54.8 | of advisors ingrained in her firm's culture and planning processes to profitably and efficiently |
| 0:59.0 | serve new and existing clients. In this episode, we talk in depth about how Lori decide to pursue |
| 1:04.8 | an advice-only hourly model to be able to serve working-age clients facing major life decisions, |
| 1:10.1 | for example, the financial |
| 1:11.8 | implications of taking a new job in a different city, as well as traditional financial planning |
| 1:16.6 | clients with more assets who might want to confirm that they're on track for retirement, |
| 1:20.9 | how Lori decided to create a hub-and-spoke model for her firm with advisors who are tied into the |
| 1:25.9 | firm's culture as well as its systems |
| 1:27.6 | in order to create a stronger brand and how Lori decided to build her own financial planning |
| 1:31.4 | software platform with the support of external developers to allow her advisors to efficiently |
| 1:36.3 | zero in on the planning issues most important to their clients. We also talk about how Lori spends |
| 1:41.4 | approximately 18% of her revenue on client acquisition, resulting |
| 1:44.7 | in 400 new clients last year with a 64% close rate. |
| 1:48.7 | How Lori's marketing spend might be relatively high amongst advisory firms in terms of percentage |
... |
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