Scaling Beyond Yourself: Growth Strategies After Gaining a Capital Partner

So let's kind of role play a bit in a sense and kind of say, let's put ourselves now in the shoes of an advisor.

and they've worked with somebody like you, with me in the past, and they've built a practice, they've scaled a practice, and now they have accepted a deal with some capital partner.

It might be minority, majority, full deal, but it's a capital partner that can do those things that we've been talking about, get things off their plate, help them de-risk, help them form a succession plan, help them achieve their highest and best use, grow faster, maybe start doing inorganic growth with capital, maybe tapping into the operational infrastructure of a company, maybe tapping into a marketing department that can help them boost their client acquisition.

So it's that kind of person we're talking to both before and post transaction.

In your mind, what's most important to that scaling? One thing that comes to mind for me that we can start to bat around a little bit is this concept that You know, the capital that now is there and the infrastructure that alone is not a strategy that exists to accelerate your strategy.

So it's important that you've got a strategy prior that allows you to scale in a predictable way.

When is the ideal time for somebody, for example, to come to you and say, I'm ready to now scale and I need to put the infrastructure and systems that depend less on me? You know, at what point does that happen? And then tell us a little bit about kind of what that conversation looks like.

How do you coach them to help them see what scaling could look like and then what the kind of ingredients to the cake need to be, per se?

Well, and I think, I mean, there's yesterday is the best time, obviously with any stage of growth, but I would say once the, once everything is dependent on you, if you, so the easiest question is, could you leave for six months and the business still run? Could you leave for a year and the business still run? If it can't, it is way too dependent on you.

And that's where we need to look at processes, people, leadership, you know, everything, marketing, all of the pieces.

So I think that's that's really the first thing to look at is most of us come into the practice because we love it and we grow it and we are the the kind of the cog that keeps it stuck sometimes.

So we're the reason it grew, but we're also the reason it plateaus.

For me, my favorite person to get is an advisor who is very successful, but has been on a little bit of a plateau or just a tiny increase year over year, because it means something's stuck.

And the cog in the wheel is usually the advisor or the leader.

So

that's probably the best time.

But as we're looking at different sizes and different practices, you know, most people are doing what they learn to do.

We did all things, right? We came in, you and I started the same.

We come in and You do all the things.

You run all the pieces of your practice.

But advisors rarely, once they grow, stop to figure out what's my strength, what's my best and highest use.

If they haven't done that, we've got to pause and figure that piece out because we can wrap everything around it.

But we need to know what are you really good at? What are you uniquely qualified to do? What do you get excited? For some people, it's planning.

For others, it's portfolio management.

For some, it's I like to be the rainmaker and be out meeting the people.