By Michael Kitces
– · 1 min read
Welcome everyone! Welcome to the 504th episode of the Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Sheri Fitts. Sheri is the founder of Sheri Fitts and Co., a marketing, event, and consulting business that works alongside financial advisors and firms.
What’s unique about Sheri, though, is how she helps financial advisors develop their personal brands to both stand out in the eyes of good-fit clients and to ensure their work is in sync with their values.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about how Sheri finds that intentionally cultivating a personal brand is important because an advisor will already have a brand (whether they like it or not), why Sheri suggests that a first step to establishing a personal brand for a financial advisor is to go where the ‘yeses’ are and investigate what made the last few new clients the advisor onboarded want to work with them, and how Sheri has found that these reasons can be illuminating to advisors because they show what clients truly value (and the attributes the advisor might want to lean into further in their marketing).
We also talk about how Sheri sees the next step in brand-building as identifying the client segment that both meshes with the advisor’s strengths and brings them joy to serve, why Sheri recommends that advisors then determine whether this particular client segment represents a viable market (perhaps aided by AI tools that can help find data on how many individuals might fit into this group and where they congregate), and how Sheri finds that experimentation can be a valuable (and low-cost) tool when building a brand (for example, by meeting individuals in the chosen client segment to find out whether the financial issues they face are a good match for the advisor’s strengths).
