What Types Of Clients Do Financial Advisors Work With At Consolidated Planning?

Financial advisors help clients make better financial decisions.

Since everyone uses money, everyone can benefit from working with a financial advisor. But as a financial advisor, you should be careful about trying to be all things to everyone. The most successful advisors are clear about their ideal clients and focus on one or two target markets to ensure their clients have a high quality experience working together.

At Consolidated Planning, we have defined planning processes for our work with several types of clients. We refined these processes over four decades, and today they serve to create predictable and repeatable results for our clients. Together with our robust advisor resources, our processes launch inexperienced advisors’ careers and add rocket fuel to veteran advisors’ practices creating exponential growth opportunities.

In this article, we’ll cover the types of clients Consolidated Planning advisors work with and the work we accomplish together. By the end of the article, you’ll know whether Consolidated Planning is a good fit for you and the practice you want to build.

Who Is A Good Financial Planning Client?

To start, clients usually make good clients when they are responsible for someone else in life. The more responsibilities they have, the more they take planning future. As an example, a young 20-something with no spouse and no kids generally won’t have the responsibilities of a 50-year-old who is married with children. Additionally, business owners often have both a family at home and employees with families – lots of responsibilities for others. While it’s not a hard and fast rule that a good client will have responsibilities for others, it’s a strong guideline to be followed.

Financial Planning For Individuals And Families

Working with individuals and families is the bread and butter of many advisors’ practices. Consolidated Planning’s distinct processes help you focus your efforts as an advisor on the three key planning periods in your clients’ lives.

Accumulation Planning

From the time a client starts their first job until shortly before they retire, their primary financial focus is accumulating assets. Many financial advisors mistakenly believe that the accumulation phase of a client’s life is simply about stockpiling as much money as possible. We know the reality is more complex.

As a financial advisor with Consolidated Planning, you’ll help clients get financially organized and become world class savers. You’ll focus on building liquidity, which is essential to ensuring their long term investment plans are not disrupted. Clients will appreciate your process based approach that seeks to put each dollar to its highest and best use.

Distribution Planning

Traditional distribution or retirement income planning is based on the interest-only concept. In short, clients accumulate as much as they can before retiring and then live off of the interest from their investments. Typically, this means withdrawing 3-4% of their investments each year and hoping everything works out for the best.

As an advisor with Consolidated Planning, you’ll show your clients a better way to create retirement income from their portfolios. You’ll help them implement a strategy that creates twice as much income as the interest-only approach while reducing taxes and increasing certainty. Your work will enable clients to thoroughly enjoy the fruits of their labor during their golden years.

Legacy Planning

Some clients joke about bouncing their last check. Others want to leave a legacy that lasts beyond their lifetime. Whether your client wants to create generational wealth for their family or has plans to leave their estate to a favorite charity, Consolidated Planning has the tools and the process to maximize your clients’ legacy and ensure their wishes come true even after they pass.

As a Consolidated Planning advisor, you’ll develop a rich relationship with your clients and help them craft a plan to accomplish their posthumous goals. You’ll coordinate their plan for maximum efficiency and leverage each dollar for its highest and best use. You’ll work with your clients to communicate their plans to their heirs and you’ll serve as an advocate for your client during emotional conversations. Best of all, you’ll have a front row seat to watch your clients’ wishes become a reality.

Financial Planning For Business Owners

Business owners have more complicated financial situations than the average person. As a result, they need more help from financial advisors to efficiently coordinate and optimize their financial lives. As a financial advisor with Consolidated Planning, you’ll help business owners in three key areas.

Exit Planning

Business owners spend their lives creating their businesses. It is the result of tremendous effort and sacrifice. As an advisor, you can help them realize the maximum value of their life’s work using Consolidated Planning’s exit planning process.

There are three potential exit paths for every business owner:

● Inside Sale – Selling the business to a child, family member, or key employee.
● Outside Sale – Selling the business to an investor, strategic buyer, or someone else outside of the company.
● Death/Disability – Keeping the business until death or disability prevents the owner from continuing to run the company.

No ifs, ands, or buts about it, Every business owner will eventually exit their business. The only question remaining is whether or not they will do it on their terms. That’s where you come in.

Retention Planning

Savvy business owners know that their people are their most valuable assets. Every business has key employees who have a disproportionate impact on the company’s bottom line. Losing these employees, especially to a competitor, would have a catastrophic negative effect. Unfortunately, most business owners attempt to retain their key employees through ineffective methods like cash bonuses.

As an advisor with Consolidated Planning, you’ll work with business owners to create key employee retention plans beyond basic employee benefits to solidify the company’s long term continuity. You’ll create plans that contain four essential attributes of an optimized retention plan.

● Substantial – Typically target around 10% of compensation per year of retention.
● Deferred – Benefit should not be received until a future date, but not so far into the future as to seem unattainable.
● Recapture – Properly structured plans will allow the business to recoup the plan’s cost over time.
● Emotional – Ideally, the plan will solve a problem for the employee that is both financial and emotional, like sending a child to college.

Your work in the retention planning space will naturally create other planning opportunities for you as you develop relationships with the company’s key employees.

Tax Reduction Planning

No one likes to pay taxes – especially business owners. As a result, business owners are always looking for ways to reduce taxes and many turn to qualified retirement plans, like 401(k) plans, to accomplish this end. These plans provide benefits to both employers and employees by creating a dedicated account for retirement savings and the potential for tax deductions and deferrals. However, these plans are highly regulated and can get you into hot water with the IRS or Department of Labor if not properly managed.

As a financial advisor with Consolidated Planning, you’ll work with business owners to help minimize current and future taxes to the fullest extent possible. With the support of internal and external retirement plan specialists, you’ll guide business owners through plan design and implementation. With the proper plan in place, you’ll implement a service model that ensures employees are confident in their retirement while reducing the business owner’s administrative burden and fiduciary risks.

What Type Of Clients Will I Work With At Consolidated Planning?

Everyone needs a financial advisor, but you can’t serve everyone as a financial advisor. When you landed on this article, you may have been asking yourself, what type of clients will I work with as a financial advisor? Or, more specifically, what types of clients will I work with at Consolidated Planning?

Now, you’ve seen examples of the work Consolidated Planning advisors do for business owners, individuals, and families. You’ve learned how we use distinct planning processes to accomplish common client goals for each type of client. These processes allow your planning practice to scale and grow in a repeatable fashion.

As an advisor with Consolidated Planning, you’ll implement our planning processes with the type of clients you enjoy. The choice is yours.

Reach out to our recruiters to learn more about working with your natural market and how to dive deeper into your target market.

 

2022-145206 Expires 10/2024