026: The Financial Advisor's Journey to Extraordinary Growth: A Conversation with Jon Randall

In this episode of The Million Dollar Producers Show, I speak with Jon Randall, the founder of Extraordinary Financial Advisors. Jon discusses the different stages of growth for financial advisors and the challenges they face when going from one million to five million in revenue.

[Main Takeaways]

- Jon's background as a financial advisor and how he became involved in coaching and consulting for other advisors.

- The different stages of growth for financial advisors, with a focus on the transition from one million to five million in revenue.

- The need for other people on the team to help with client acquisition and servicing as a key difference between the stages of growth.

- Introduction to the Financial Advisor Success Syndicate, an initiative to provide value and guidance to financial advisors.

- The importance of writing a book in establishing credibility and differentiation for financial advisors. Jon shares his own experience of writing "Attract More Clients Better Clients" and how it has helped him establish authority in the industry.

- Discussion on the potential benefits of a book for larger firms with multiple advisors, such as consistency of messaging and establishing credibility.

- Offer of a free custom growth guide for financial advisors looking to grow their practice, with personalized guidance on their growth path.

- Importance of continuous improvement, sharing best practices, and leveraging resources like books in order to grow and establish oneself as extraordinary in the industry.

About Our Guest: Jon Randall
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonrandallcmc/
Website: https://www.xfa.coach/
Financial Advisor Success Syndicate (FASS): https://joinfass.com/

About Your Host:  Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.

As the author of three books, including The Short Book Formula: A Financial Professional's Guide To Writing A Book In Six Weeks To Attract Ideal Clients, and Million Dollar Producer: The Secret Playbook For Financial Professional's To Land High-Value Clients Using LinkedIn, Paul has become a leading authority for financial professionals on using writing and LinkedIn to attract high-value clients

You can get a complimentary copy of Paul's book at: www.theshortbookformula.com

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:32

Welcome to another episode of the Million Dollar Producers Show. I'm your host, Paul G McManus, and today we're speaking with John Randall. John is the founder and driving force behind extraordinary financial advisors. He's been active since 2004, coaching and consulting with some of the rapidly growing names in the financial advisory field. He's also a regular national presenter at financial services conferences and the author of the book Attract More Clients Better Clients. John, it's great to have you on our show today, Welcome.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Thank you, paul. It's great to be here, looking forward to this.

Speaker 1: 1:08

Just to kick things off, tell us a little bit about your background and how you became to do what you do today.

Speaker 2: 1:14

I really started as a financial advisor. I had no intentions of doing coaching, consulting for others. I started in the late 90s. My wife's from New York. I got started as advisor there, got a wonderful jumpstart to the business Lot of great leaders, lot of great teachers. My wife's brother was on a baseball scholarship in North Carolina where we live now.

Speaker 2: 1:35

When I moved I started over in my practice. But when I moved I had all these advisors in North Carolina come to me and they said hey, john, would you show me what all those big producers in New York are doing, that they write so much business? So I showed them. Now I knew what worked to acquire clients. I'd done the business for five years and I applied what I knew worked and avoided what I did not work. So in about a year and a half I rebuilt what it took me five years to build in New York.

Speaker 2: 2:03

Different set of advisors came to me and said whoa, how did you grow so fast? How do you acquire clients? Would you show me and expand this consulting that I do? So it was really just showing other people best practices. I fell in love with it. I grew a really great practice, really great team over the years, but I just gravitated to helping other advisors and it became more and more of what I do. I got out of the last bit of my practice just so I can help advisors here about seven years ago and I'm just loving it. So helping advisors grow is really what I do. I love helping them get wins quickly and I'm just super passionate about it. We love helping more people.

Speaker 1: 2:42

Yeah, fantastic. We met recently on a Zoom call with correct people. I'm wrong, but it was with your mastermind group, which was the $5 million plus.

Speaker 2: 2:53

Yes.

Speaker 1: 2:54

I'm guessing that's on the higher end of all the clients that you work with. Or tell us a little bit about just the different groups that you work with, and from the most successful to the moderately successful, to the I don't want to say less successful, but to the people just starting to work with you.

Speaker 2: 3:10

Yeah, we've got programs for people just doing a couple hundred thousand in revenue all the way up to people doing close to nine figures in revenue. We work with everyone in between. So I think our average producer now is probably about 3 and 1 half 4 million if you add it all up. But there's a lot of folks that are right around that million mark that are saying, hey, we've grown this, I want to go to the next level, I want to double. Maybe I've hit a glass ceiling or I'm not growing as fast as I used to.

Speaker 2: 3:37

That's a lot of people we work with. It's fun working with the really large ones. They've gone so much further. We extract some best practices for them and pass them on. But we segment the groups of people we help with by production, because someone doing a half million it's a totally different game compared to someone doing five million. So we just work on different things, some different programs for those folks, and we've got some easy entry points where it's very low cost for some smaller businesses. And then we do have some really in-depth relationships for some larger businesses where we're coaching all the advisors on their team, everyone in between. But I saw a lot of people come to us that are doing around a million trying to drop wool, trying to crop droop wool that's pretty typical.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Yeah, I think for a lot of people, getting up to a million is the first big hurdle that they face. Yeah, what do you see from going from one million to maybe five million? What are those hurdles? Again, most people they come into it. It's marketing, it's grit, it's sales. Yes, they get some to that million, but how do you help them? Or what do you see those patterns are when it comes to getting them from that first million up to that multi-million dollar level?

Speaker 2: 4:47

The main difference is they're going to need other people on their team to get them to that level. You're right, it's grit and grind to get to a million. It's usually the owner or the founder is doing it themselves. They put this thing on their back. They grow it themselves, but they hit a glass ceiling on what they can do. Personally. We find about a million one and a half million is a sound barrier for a lot. There's some outliers that work with either really high-network clients who can do a few million on their own. To get to five you've got to have other financial advisors on the team who are working with clients. The difference is how do I let go? How do I help other people on my team work with clients, do more with clients? How do they take the firm's ways and execute this? That's why I say it's a very different game because it's not the main person executing.

Speaker 2: 5:36

At five million, the owner, founder. They're doing the least amount of work with clients. There's going to be many other advisors at that stage are doing more of the work with clients. Then it becomes about how do we lead them, how do we give them resources from the firm? How do we organize the information of the way the firm does things, so that the advisors have it and they can do it consistently. It's a big difference. It's hard because no one ever taught us a lot of that stuff. We learn how to be an advisor and we learn how to grit and grind. No one ever taught us leadership skills. No one ever taught us how to organize our information so for the advisors can understand and execute it. It's just different. I would say it's not harder, it's just a different game as you grow these different leaps from a million to five, five to 10, 10 to 100. It's just a different game at each level.

Speaker 1: 6:25

No, it seems that for a lot of people, to your point, they come in, they're good at sales, they're good at marketing, they're good at giving advice, and it's a completely different skill set that requires them to grow. How many people are successful in that? I don't know the numbers, but it seems like it's just a completely different barrier. If you want to, it requires a completely different skill set than what the person made them successful in the first place. There's an executive coach, marshall Goldsmith, who I don't know, if you're familiar with, but he is Love Marshall Goldsmith.

Speaker 2: 7:00

You're one of the famous book we got you here, we'll get you here.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Yes, I don't know if you could walk us through some sort of case study or some more concrete examples. There you go, see, right there, and for a listening audience, john is holding up the buck In as much detail as you can and if you have a case study or something along those lines, take us through that journey from one million to five million. I'm at the top of my game and suddenly it's like I don't have the skills necessary to get to where I want to go. That must be both frustrating and challenging for some people, but also, I think, for the, I would imagine, for the people that go through the process and actually work their way through it. I'm sure it's profoundly exhilarating. It is.

Speaker 2: 7:43

And we're spoiled because we work with people that are just they're getting it, they're growing just because we know it works. We've helped so many practices through it. So people we work with are grown by over 30% a year on average, so they're cranking. Most people get stuck, though. Most people never really get out of one point five million. They just grow, they get stuck there and they never graduate. I'd say that's a lot of our industry, but really in that journey we frame everything.

Speaker 2: 8:07

We've got a model around growth that really has three levels. If you think about building a two-story house or two-story building, you've got to start with the foundation right. You can't build the second floor first. So the foundation is we call client optimization, so it's doing more with clients, and so there's a lot of business to be captured with the clients of financial advisor practices. There's ways that we can service these people that will keep them around and make them so happy that they want to refer other people. So we look at that is so critical the foundation. The stronger the foundation, the more floors we can build, the stronger the bigger house, the bigger building we can build. So we start there and so a lot of practices can grow really quickly with what's just sitting around, and so for someone that's doing it all themselves they're doing most of the work with clients. It's them doing it. I think between like a million and three million, it's a combo of them doing it and them starting to get other people on their team to do it too. And, if we can frame it around simple things, let's help clients do this. Let's help clients do that. It helps to grow because a lot of times the founders like the Rainmaker they're the ones bringing in the business and they need other advisors to do the servicing work. That's the most time-consuming thing that exists. So if you're not having them learn 100 parts of this business or having to go out and get clients you may have for listening when you started, it's really hard. It's easy for them that they just have to service and help people with a small number of things. So it makes it a little bit easier for them to say, okay, I can get my advisors up and running, just working on the foundation, we're going to be super awesome at helping people with more stuff, and then it makes the other stages easier.

Speaker 2: 9:54

The next stage is attracting ideal clients. We're doing a really good job. For the top clients. It's like easy and some of the best practices. They don't really have to do much marketing because people just come their way, because they do such a great job In the highest level.

Speaker 2: 10:08

To really go to the next level of growth is like mergers and acquisitions. So usually over 3 million, it's okay. We've done a lot here. We've got ways we bring in clients mostly from referrals, maybe from professional alliances, like a CPA relationship. But that next stage, over 3 million, it's okay to grow at 30 plus percent. We can have an acquisition here and maybe bring another advisor to work those acquired clients. So that's really our three stages of growth in our model.

Speaker 2: 10:39

But for a practice to grow we really work on the same thing. Somebody that's doing only half million. They really just need the foundation and the second level of attract more people as they grow. Then they grow to a point where it's okay, we're ready for we're really good at the first two stages. Now we're ready to acquire because we've got a great foundation, our first floor solid. Now we can really bring in the large blocks of clients at once. They're requiring we see more acquisitions, more so than mergers, but that's like exponential growth. That's how people do in like 10 million, get the five, get the 15, people in 15, get the 30.

Speaker 2: 11:15

Our like $7,500 million practice we work with they've been built with a lot of acquisitions so the fundamentals still really matter.

Speaker 2: 11:24

They got to be doing more with clients because acquisitions have tons of opportunities in them. Tons. A lot of sellers are. They've been on cruise control like a lot of autopilot them really been growing as much so they can really get a lot of growth with what they purchase and then get a lot of referrals from those people too. That's the stages and that's really part of the path that people grow and it's so fun to watch people go through these stages. What's really cool is some of our coaches now on our team are these people. They're people that have been through that growth and they mentioned going from like a million to five million. There's a coach on our team went from 500,000 to five million with us in the last six years and now the owner or the founder I should say has a son taking over as the main owner and so now he's got some time. So he does a couple of days a week, does some consulting with us and he's really impactful because he went through the journey a lot more recent than I did.

Speaker 2: 12:18

I know it, but coaches like that can be really helpful for others. But we've just aligned everything to these three simple stages in our model and it really helps practices grow much quicker but also keep it simpler along the way.

Speaker 1: 12:33

What's the biggest difference between the stage two and stage three, where it's, if I heard you correctly, it's attracting the ideal clients and being very clear on who they are? Yeah, it shifts over to that stage three, which is more about acquisitions. I guess the question I have is why can't someone just continue to grow more organically through what they've been doing? What kind of necessitates that shift in strategy?

Speaker 2: 12:58

Yeah. So if you look at let's start with the ring, let's say they're capable of bringing in 25 million and new assets a year. If you're only doing 50 million a year or managing 50 million, you're bringing 25, that's a lot of growth. If you're managing 250 million and you bring in 25, it becomes a much smaller percentage impact. So there's usually like a diminishing percentage on what the organic kind of client acquisition strategies bring.

Speaker 2: 13:30

Yes, they increase over time, but to really get at that 20, 30, 40, 50% growth rates, they just need some other ways to bring in larger blocks of clients quicker. So that's usually why people turn to okay, I can acquire another 100 million. Bring that into my book. Now we're up 125 million because I'm organically bringing in some and some advisors are better than others. We know some can bring in 50 million a year on their own. Some practices bring in nine figures and new assets every year, but a lot don't. A lot struggle just to bring in 10 million and new assets and so they really want to grow. Sometimes they need a boost, but they got to be ready for it. They got a good foundation. They got to have solid what they do with clients. They got to have some ways to get organically new people and then go that path. So I know it's sexy and fun Everyone wants to go to be fun part first.

Speaker 2: 14:23

It's just to our positions I'll solve all my problems, and I tell you it won't. It makes your problems way worse. So if your foundation is strong and you start building floors on it, that whole thing's going to crumble quick. But same with acquiring clients. A lot of advisors think, hey, if I just acquire new people, they'll solve all my problems. And yes, new clients, new assets, do help us grow. But we've got to be really good at what we do with clients. We really got to help them. We got to have ways to keep them around and to make them so happy that they want to tell other people about it. So it all lines up. But it is interesting, though, and just what can be done with clients? What can be done to track people organically? It just when you get really big, it just becomes a smaller percentage and acquisitions becomes more of the game. At that point, Very interesting.

Speaker 1: 15:08

I want to shift gears slightly Now. You're involved in a new initiative, along with John Cutten and several other individuals that are the founding members, called the Financial Advisor Success Syndicate. What is the Financial Advisor Success Syndicate and what is your role in it?

Speaker 2: 15:26

Yeah. So it's really a group of just great people in the industry that are giving away value to advisors. It's a really cool forum. There really isn't anything out there like it. All of us in the forum we all get asked questions all the time.

Speaker 2: 15:38

That, like John Cutten, is near and dear to me because John was my training manager when I started in New York. So I've known him my whole career and it's been fun work with him and seeing him grow an awesome practice. We love working with him and his team. They're rocking. But he's really the brainchild of it and he really put together. What he saw is these are the things advisors really need to grow. So here's some different services that are available to advisors. Let's get them together in FAS and let's give away a lot of advice to people. So I'll tell you, yes, people come to him every day saying, hey, how should I do this? How should I do that? We all do, and now it's a forum we can share. Hey, here's best practices. People can ask questions. We're just trying to make the industry better.

Speaker 2: 16:23

One of my personal mission when I really help other advisors I recognize okay, the number of Americans I can help is in the hundreds. In my practice, maybe in the low thousands when I help other advisors, I might be able to increase that to five figures, six figures, maybe one day seven figures of Americans are much better off with our help. Everyone kind of shares that same mindset that we can make our industry better by just offering help and giving away value here. Accelerating what all the advisors are doing makes it a little efficient for us that we can give away value on one forum instead of people coming to us individually. But that's really what it is. I'm just one of the founders that gives away value there of, mainly on this topic of growth how do you grow, how do you double contribute your business? That's what I'm in there giving away. So it's a really neat idea and a great value. Everyone listening should definitely join that. It's free.

Speaker 1: 17:19

Very cool Switching gears again Now. I know when we first met, I want to say, a couple months ago. You shared with me that and I mentioned in the beginning of this in your intro. But you're the author of a book and attract more clients, better clients, and writing and publishing books, of course, is near and dear to my heart, as you're aware. I'd love to shift gears and just have you tell us a little bit about your thoughts on writing a book. You talked about the three lovers of growth, from foundation to attracting ideal clients, to mergers and acquisitions. What role, if any, does a book play in any of those phases of growth and just what are your high level thoughts on the usefulness or not of writing a book?

Speaker 2: 18:03

Having a book is an instinct game changer. You're like instantly credible. I call it. It's the ultimate business card. I'm not doing it to try and make a lot of money with the book. It's to give away value, but it really is instant credibility. Oh my gosh, you have a book. I published it back in 2010. So it's been a long time. Thankfully, all the stuff in there is still very relevant today.

Speaker 2: 18:28

It's all stuff I learned just by doing this business the wrong way, the right way, learning from other advisors. But I tell you how it came about. Advisors they wanted to hear the sexy stuff, right. The foundation stuff is kind of boring. Some people are interested in that. People want to know how do you acquire more clients quickly. That's like what everyone wants. So that's why I did the book on that. It was the most asked for topic when I spoke, so I was going around speaking. I did some workshops with advisors so I actually had a workbook that was like things that advisors could do to attract more clients and better clients duplicate their better people and it was somebody's in a session gave an idea to me. They said this should be like an actual book. This is good stuff and I thought sounds like a good idea. So I had.

Speaker 2: 19:17

I live on the East Coast in North Carolina. I had a couple of these workshops out in San Francisco. So on those long, they're like five hour plane flights for me here going across country and one of those like flying over and flying back. I just put some like stories around the concepts and then I think I got connected with a ghost writer who back then we didn't have the technology to put together, but quickly I had to go to somebody who was like proficient at writing a book, because I certainly was not. I just knew the facts and I had some stories. So she was great. She really took what I started and made it into an actual book. She even interviewed some of the people I was coaching who are really good at this stuff, and so there was like interviews throughout, but it was.

Speaker 2: 20:04

I really wanted it to be straightforward. I did not want it to be long, I wanted it to be short and at the end of every chapter there's quick bullet points of here's what to go and put them in a do. So you could read the book in like minutes and get all the takeaways which I, if I can get the cliff notes of what's the learning? What can I implement? You can totally do that with this thing, but it's a game changer, man. I highly recommend for anyone out there. You should definitely have a book. It's a game changer for practices.

Speaker 2: 20:35

What's also neat is if you are really going to grow and you're going to have other advisors on your team, it's pretty credible that, okay, you're the founder, you wrote this book. You must be a qualified person if you publish the book. But it's neat that it gets you out of the. You have to be advisor. Other advisors on the team can be the main person. Clients can get something from the book. They get something from the advisors, but in a way, it's interesting. It gets you out of having to do it all. It's okay, it's in a book now, so I don't need this person directly. Someone on their team can get me just as much value. It's an interesting transition. So these people looking to really move up, market and really grow it is such a game changer. I highly recommend it for everyone. It's been so helpful in our coaching business. But I think for financial advisors out there should totally have a book, because think about how many advisors have a book. There's not many. And the ones that do, it's instant differentiation.

Speaker 1: 21:35

I'd love to dig a little bit deeper there into what you're saying. To your point, there's two potential ways to think about it. One is more that smaller advisor who's out using the book to market themselves. But then the other one is what you were talking more about. I just want to underscore that is that if you're an advisor with a bigger firm maybe a multiple advisors that you're training and perhaps you're trying to get yourself out of or do less of the advising yourself and you're building up your team, but you also want to have that consistency of messaging philosophy and I think to your point, arguably, you want people to still retail clients, to still feel that they have some, that they know who you are right, you may not be in the room, you may not, you may never meet the person, but you still want them to feel comfortable and excited that they're working with your firm.

Speaker 1: 22:31

I know that you said a lot about this, but is there anything you would add to that? Because I think that's really one of those things that I don't know. I've heard a lot of advisors talk about that's a game changer, especially when it comes to growing your practice. Myself, for example, I just brought on two new employees. Guess what?

Speaker 1: 22:46

the first thing I did was here's book number one and here's book number two Get yourself up to speed, because it captures everything that I stand for, the message that we have, and it can be done so succinctly versus taking months and years to have the person, by osmosis, gather all this information and absorb all these things. Day one, here you go.

Speaker 2: 23:10

Yeah, it's well. I was gonna say too, it's nice to have someone like you that knows the formula right? I didn't know what I was doing 15 years ago when I started putting this together and I just knew that when I read books, if it's like a marathon read, I'm gonna struggle to get through it. If it's shorter and there's like quick summary here's the bullet points hey, I'm in, I'll rip right through it. It's so helpful to have that.

Speaker 2: 23:33

But look at some, like John Cutton, who talked about what legend in our industry Barron's top 100, barron's Hall of Fame and one of the best this firm name is cutting wealth. Like Clients don't work with John Cutton. He hadn't sat in front of a client I think it's 13 years now, so no one gets him. But now he's got a book right, you helped him with this book. Now he's got something that's, oh, this, what this person's about. He's even coupling it with some things for clients like podcasts and videos and things like that, which is really quite interesting.

Speaker 2: 24:04

So the whole surround sound about that. It just it makes the person more real. It makes the firm, I think, more meaningful. But it I use that term game changer I just seen it for and not many people have it, but those that do it, just going back to the word differentiation, it makes them different. It's so much more credible. It really does work, but it's so worth it to work with somebody that knows that they're doing. That's all that you, paul, with. This is the road, this is exact how to write a book, and and you can put it together for him pretty quickly.

Speaker 1: 24:38

Just in wrapping up a little bit. And what asked? A couple more questions. Extraordinary financial advisors how did you come up with that name so?

Speaker 2: 24:46

We find most financial advisors are Ordinary, right. We don't get a good reputation in our industry. We probably we get a kind of a bad rap. Most advisors are thought of as they don't work very hard and make lots of money, and Unfortunately that's true. We're really here to work with the ones that want to be extra ordinary. They want to be set, they want to stand out from the crowd. They really want to be the stars. Those are the people that they don't have to be there today. They just desire to be there to make a difference in the world, to help people. That's the ones that we love working with, so we call them extraordinary and that's really what led to the name. Xfa coach, which is our website is what people call our business to XFA or XFA coach, and it's really neat just to align this what we do with our firm name and really help an advisors be Extraordinary for their clients and their prospects people they come across now and you may have already mentioned this, but just in terms of someone listen this podcast.

Speaker 1: 25:51

What are the most common reasons that people reach out to you and are looking for help?

Speaker 2: 25:56

They want to grow right and we've got some easy steps for advisors that want to grow and go to the next level. We have a free custom growth guide that can be yours. I get those email me. It's John J oh and no H, john J oh and XFA coach. I also email our team at XFA coach.

Speaker 2: 26:16

But really, what this will do, this will set your path to success. It'll help identify what are the opportunities in your practice to grow. So this guide will get you there. What do you work with us or not? We're willing to give that to you because we believe you can do so much more for your clients. We believe that you can grow by do more for your clients and go into the stages we talked about of the foundation, client optimization, then attracting more clients, ideal clients, then getting to that level that you're requiring other Practices. It's really a simple step on our website. Check us out, but anyone listening. You could personally email me. I'd be happy to email you back and we'll get you your own personal growth guide to be your first step to doubling, tripling, quadruple your business right, cool.

Speaker 1: 26:59

Is there any question that I haven't asked you that you think would be relevant to this conversation?

Speaker 2: 27:03

No, you're pretty good man. You did a great job here, paul, it's. I love what you do. It's really cool to be on here and I love this whole concept of really great producers right, the million dollar producer show is really cool, so I know some of you listening want to get there to million, which everyone is capable of. That's one of the things we talk about. As an Individual producer should get to million. I know there's multi-million dollar producers listening to and just it's a cool journey. The game changes, which is really fun.

Speaker 2: 27:30

But definitely get a book out there. I've listened and hopefully many of you did, and yeah, it's just an honor to be on here and hopefully someone had one little take away from this and they get a little bit better and we can help anyone grow. We're here to do it.

Speaker 1: 27:44

Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.