Hi, everyone. Welcome to What Works. This is a show for consortium advisors that taps into over 1,000 years of experience shared by our consortium advisors.

I’m your host, Don Patrick, and I’m here to guide the conversation with guest advisors and lift the hood on what works for them in business and life. It’s all about learning and growing.

So let’s go.

Don Patrick: Welcome, everybody, to episode number five of the IFG podcast, What Works. Our special guest today is Brad Williams. He’s a financial planner at Highlands Wealth Group up in Greer, South Carolina. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Williams: Hey Don, thanks for having me.

Don Patrick: Yeah. We’re going to have some fun. Let’s learn a little bit about you, your family, just some background there.

Brad Williams: Sure. Happy to share. Don, I’m from the upstate. I grew up in Spartanburg and live in the Simpsonville area of South Carolina now. And like you said, our office is in Greer. So we have quite a bit of connection all around upstate South Carolina. I am married to my wife, Jenny, for just over five years now.

She is an executive producer at our local NBC news station. Her job’s a lot more interesting to talk about than mine, but I know that’s not the goal of today, but certainly fun to be involved in what’s happening with local news here in the upstate. And we are planning a first birthday party for our daughter Cora, who will turn one next month.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic. How exciting. That’s great.

Brad Williams: Yes, sir.

Don Patrick: Now, where’d you two meet?

Brad Williams: So Jenny and I actually, we met as students in the Honors College at the University of South
Carolina, but we did not actually know each other very well. We had the opportunity to reconnect in Greenville and when I moved back to the upstate to join the private banking organization here, I discovered that Jenny was local and I remembered her from college, and as a game here in the upstate, I felt like I needed as many of my own kind in my life as I could get, at least that was the line that I used to get Jenny to meet me for drinks at a place in downtown Greenville.

But we reconnected and I was immediately hit with the reality that she was the one whose heart I was meant to pursue. And it took her a little more convincing than it did me. She did turn me down the first time I asked her out on a date, but here we are five years married and a 10-month-old little girl.

Don Patrick: Fantastic. So you are persistent. It’s a great story. I also want to compliment you on the fact that you said University of South Carolina and not USC.

Brad Williams: Well, I mean, we are 49 years older as an institution than the University of South California, but that’s neither here nor there.

Don Patrick: So I have a t-shirt that says the real USC and it has all the championships on the back of it.

Brad Williams: Well I guess I could get the South Carolina college charter and put that on a t-shirt.

Don Patrick: So you know that went to the Supreme Court, right? USC.

Brad Williams: I’m very familiar with all the intellectual property battles that have gone down.

Don Patrick: What a waste of taxpayer money.

Brad Williams: Absolutely.

Don Patrick: So what kind of hobbies you have?

Brad Williams: Well, number one, I’m very musical, Don. I sing in the choir at our church. I also participate some in contemporary music, play guitar and banjo. So music is particularly important to me, something I spent a lot of time doing, something that I’m very passionate about. Jenny and I love live music. We take every opportunity we can to see live music and go to concerts for artists that we love, and others that we’re just discovering. So I would say from a hobby standpoint, that’s number one.

Don Patrick: At that, we have a lot of musicians in the consortium. It’s amazing.

Brad Williams: Yeah, we should add, we should get a band together or something, Don.

Don Patrick: We actually, one year we’re trying to arrange that at the retreat. But it just, it was too difficult, I think, that the musicians decided it was too much work.

Brad Williams: Sure, sure, sure.

Don Patrick: So you got out of school, go back upstate and you said you got a job.

Brad Williams: Yeah, I actually had a more of a roundabout way of ending back in the upstate of South Carolina after my undergrad. When I was a sophomore, I started working for what was then the Smith Barney office.

It became Morgan Stanley about two months after I joined them. I had an internship with a wealth group there and I spent just over two years with them, ended up being reclassified as a client service associate, even though I was still in college ‘cause they couldn’t keep me that long as an intern.
Loved working with those guys and was certainly interesting to be there in 2009 and in the bottom of the financial crisis to see how they were handling that with their clients and going through, an acquisition at the same time. So really, really good learning experience for me, but that ultimately led me to join BB& T.

I went into their leadership development program out of undergrad. So I spent a little under a year in Winston Salem in what I like to call bank camp, learning about everything that there is to learn about a commercial and retail bank, traveling all over the footprint of BB& T to shadow different bankers and different lines of businesses.

And I was hired there in their wealth management track. So that’s where I got securities licensed and specifically shattered a lot of people in their wealth group and spent some time in Charlotte in a call center that supported their entire wealth organization. I had a lot of success there, adding value for advisors that I was supporting that was right in the middle of when everybody and their brother could refinance their mortgage at much lower rates than what they had.

This is 2011, 2012 we’re talking about. And that value add of looking into those opportunities and reaching out to advisors got me an opportunity to get a client-facing role a lot earlier than was anticipated. And I ended up in Myrtle Beach, and an office in Pawleys Island, actually.

And I covered the entire grand strand and out into the PD area like Florence, South Carolina, and I was there for a couple of years. Did not love living in Myrtle Beach. I’m not a beach guy and not a huge young professional community there as a 23, 24-year-old age I was at the time, and had the opportunity to come join Wells Fargo’s private banking organization in Greenville, which got me back closer to family.

My dad lived with multiple sclerosis for many years and was in very much a declining state at that point so it was very important for me to be closer to him specifically. And I’m very fortunate that I had that opportunity. I ended up moving him eight minutes away from me and being in the upstate allowed me to spend the last years of his life with him directly. And that meant the world to me.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic. What a tremendous amount of experience you had at such a young age.
That’s impressive.

Brad Williams: Well, I certainly learned a lot of what to do and what not to do, Don, and all of that.

Don Patrick: So now your Wells and what capacity or capacities.

Brad Williams: Yeah, Wells Fargo, I initially joined their group as a private banker.
So I had the opportunity to work as part of a team with high net worth families. At that point in time, they had a million-dollar minimum, a million-dollar relationship at Wells Fargo to qualify for the private bank.
During my time there, that minimum rose up to 2.5 million, then up to 5 million dollars, which certainly
impacts a smaller community market like Greenville far more than it would say in Atlanta or Charlotte.
So it made a lot of change happen and I had an opportunity to become what they wanted to call a national private banker where I would have served a book of clients across the Southeast, but almost entirely remote and that’s not what I wanted to do. I wanted to be face-to-face with clients.

I wanted to be directly involved in financial planning activities. And through that experience, I actually worked with a portfolio manager named Heather Boone, who is the wife of my now good friend and business partner, Terrell Boone here at Highlands Wealth Group. And Terrell was a financial advisor at Wells and he and I had a number of conversation.

And so when all that change was happening in the private bank, I had the opportunity to move to a different role that allowed me to work directly with Terrell on a daily basis. And that was really the genesis of the many conversations that led us to ultimately decide to go out as independents and start Highlands Wealth Group.

Don Patrick: So when you were working with Terrell, what were the roles that you had and he had?

Brad Williams: So I was what would they call it a premier banker. So I was the banker and he was the financial advisor. So I handled all of the banking and lending activities of our clients. It was really my role to work with more complex clients based on assets or business owners or what have you, and identify opportunities to get Terrell involved.

So he and I, as a team, work together on a number of client relationships. Some of those were relationships that Terrell already had been working with, others were new to both of us in terms of both the banking and potentially, growing investment relationship as well.

Don Patrick: So in your role, the various roles, I mean, I know you do really good and deep financial
planning. Were you doing that at Wells?

Brad Williams: Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting question because I would tell you, Don, that I thought I was. And now I don’t think that I was. My idea of what financial planning is has evolved tremendously over my career and particularly in the last three years at BB&T, we had a centralized financial planning group that we would refer to and what the deliverables were for that were nothing like what I’m doing now.

And so I would say that I was participating in financial planning activities, but I wasn’t fully doing financial planning until we built our process here at Highlands Wealth Group and had the ability to offer that top-to-bottom experience where we delve into every aspect of our client’s financial lives.

Don Patrick: So, is it, are you suggesting it was more modular as opposed to a comprehensive financial plan?

Brad Williams: For sure, yeah. I would certainly say that’s true. We were addressing the symptoms instead of diagnosing the problems more so prior to the process that we have now.

Don Patrick: What software are you using for financial planning?

Brad Williams: We actually recently made the switch from MoneyGuidePro over to eMoney, but I always say that charts and graphs do not a financial plan make. The software, in my opinion, does support the recommendations and really helps us from an education standpoint, and we’d like to–MoneyGuidePro, the biggest factor of moving over to eMoney was number one, the ability to have unlimited document storage for our clients. It just makes gathering information and sending information so much easier that our clients have access to that and eMoney. The reporting capabilities of eMoney we felt were more robust and the client interface with their website, we felt was much better also, which had a lot to do with that move.

But again, we use the software to support the deeper planning and recommendations that we create for our clients rather than relying on the software to tell us what the results are.

Don Patrick: So walk us through the steps or stages when a new prospective client shows up, how many meetings, how do you do these things and what do you call them?

Brad Williams: There’s flexibility in terms of what that looks like in terms of how many meetings for clients because as you know, Don, discovery can be an ongoing process as we’re gathering data and we’re learning and understanding the current financial and personal circumstances of each client. But I like to conduct what I call the introduction meeting, some people might call that a fit meeting.
I think that’s an appropriate terminology. That meeting for me today looks probably 90% of the person I’m talking to speaking and about 10% me speaking. I really positioned that meeting as I don’t need you to come prepared with any financial documentation. I don’t need to know anything other than what personal and financial circumstances in your own words led you to want to meet with somebody like me.

And I, of course, ask questions throughout that meeting. And I get a sense of where the pain points are, what’s happening in their life that really made it a priority to take the action to actually schedule a meeting.
A lot of us know that a time of transition or a change or really what prompts meeting with somebody like us, most people won’t schedule those meetings when everything’s just going well.

So it’s an opportunity for conversation. And I usually try to repeat back to the person I’m talking to two or
three of the main topics that they pointed out to me, really convey to them how we help people in similar situations, what we’ve done in the past, what we intend to do going forward and what that process looks like.

And I found that in almost every scenario in that meeting, we’re able to mutually determine whether working together is a good fit. I don’t generally ask for a commitment in that meeting, but I do follow up with a recommended scope of engagement where I disclose the services we will provide as part of planning and the costs associated with that so that they can review what we’ve talked about, ask me questions and then make a determination.

And then in almost every case where we get to the point where I’m actually providing a recommended scope of engagement, it’s a matter of a day or two before I get yay or nay on that. In the event that we really feel like it’s not a good fit. I also have a process for helping position a different professional that might be more appropriate, you know, if it’s a simple banking need or say, a lending need of some kind, and it’s not really a full financial planning need or not really a good fit for the type of service we provide.

Once we’ve engaged for a new planning experience, I actually like to go ahead and do the data gathering.
So the first step is setting up their eMoney website, uploading documentation. We have a detailed data-gathering checklist that I give to every client. I upload it in the vault and eMoney, and then I check in once a week while we’re gathering that information just to update folks on where we are in that process, what else is needed, what we’ve gotten so far, all along the while, I’m generally doing a preliminary review of that information because I like to have that in the pocket before we have the discovery meeting.

So in that meeting, I can ask, that’s a face-to-face meeting where I ask clarifying questions about the preliminary review of the data that I’ve done to get a better sense of the current financial scenario. But we also completed goal setting exercise. I have a goal-setting checklist. I usually ask folks to fill out ahead of that meeting.

That kind of helped me frame that conversation, but I always talk about goals, Don, that everybody’s got financial ideas, but ideas are not goals. Goals have to be more specific. We use that smart goal method of applying those characteristics to the ideas that folks have financially so that we can have something very specific to aim for as part of the financial planning process and ultimately what leads to the recommendations. So once I’ve completed that discovery meeting, I then prepare the plan. My clients know that they can expect me to probably reach out, you know, ad hoc during that process, if there’s any additional clarifying information that I might need to gain from them.

But usually, it’s a two to four-week process for me to complete their financial plans and prepare the recommendations. And then we get back together again for that planned delivery meeting where I show them the results of the current scenario and walk them through my various recommendations. In certain complex cases, that actually might be two meetings. I try not to melt people’s brains in that meeting, Don. I mean, I really work hard to not try to dazzle folks with the depths of my own expertise in that meeting. I like to make it as simple and digestible as possible. I tell every client that I have a baseline obligation to educate you at least up to the level you need to be educated to make the most informed decision possible.

I’m willing to go further and deeper than that if you’re interested in that level of education, but most folks,
Don, just want to be told what’s the best route to take. What was our recommendation? And then beyond that, they just want to go live their lives. So I try to be sensitive to that as well. And after that meeting, we put together a action plan for implementation. Most of my initial planning engagements are three months after the delivery of the financial plan before we began to think about an ongoing planning engagement.

And this is all if I’m not managing an investment relationship because we certainly don’t require that for our clients who do financial planning with us, but if they do choose to move investments to our firm, we’ll certainly consider the cost of investment management in terms of what the ultimate cost, if any would continue for financial planning services, which is something we provide to every client, regardless of whether they have an investment relationship with us.

Don Patrick: Let me back up just a second. So on that, you didn’t call a presentation meeting.

Brad Williams: Plan delivery.

Don Patrick: Plan delivery is, are you using a screen and using the software live or are you giving them a notebook? How do you do that?

Brad Williams: Yeah, I do a little bit of both. I do like to provide a notebook that has the detailed bulleted recommendations, but I also boil everything down to a one-page action items page ‘cause that’s, if you don’t remember anything else that I said, these are the actual items that need to be completed in order to put this plan into action. And oftentimes I’ll revise that action items list after the plan delivery meeting because there’s multiple courses of action clients can take. It’s my job to show them what those courses are and to talk to them about the various merits of each. And so once we’ve got a good sense of the direction we’re going, I provide that action items list, and then I joined them on that journey to implement those action items. But in that folder will be that action items page, usually a couple of different reports that are relevant to their specific scenario from eMoney, not a whole lot, maybe five or six different things. But then on the screen, I like to show a few reports from eMoney, and that’s different depending on the plan. I mean, there’s cost of education reports. I tend to show the cash flow report in there and in just about every plan delivery because that gives a good sense of where everything’s coming from at various seasons, lives and where it’s going to support the methodology and the thought process behind any recommendation that we’re making.

Don Patrick: So then you have roughly a three-month period of implementation following the plan delivery.

Brad Williams: Correct.

Don Patrick: And pricing. So, you indicated they don’t have to have assets, so you’re obviously charging for these plans. What does that look like?

Brad Williams: Yeah, that’s been an evolving process. I would say that in the first couple of years that I was doing this, I was very much underpricing myself, but I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with the process of how I determine what I’m charging for financial planning. For the most part, an initial planning engagement with the clients that I typically work with, most of them range somewhere between 2,500 to 7,500 dollars.

And that includes the completion of the financial plan and recommendations and that three-month implementation period. I determined that cost based on complexity of the plan. Is it all W2 income? Are we working with somebody that’s self-employed? Is there equity compensation? Are there income distributions from trust? Are there special needs children? Are they earning income from multiple sources? Am I reviewing more than one tax return? Am I looking at business tax returns? So that I have a spreadsheet where I’ve kind of listed out these various characteristics that could be involved in a financial plan that sort of helps me determine the methodology behind my pricing.

I also have done less expensive plans because we do like to work with younger families. My most recent plan engagement is for a young couple, both engineers. They’re in their mid-twenties, and they’re paying a fee of about 2,000 dollars for their initial financial plan. Not a lot of complexity, but certainly great folks with high income potential, already earning high income for their age, but just really want to get off on the right foot. And so I will take a plan like that here and there, but by and far, most of our plans are in that 20, probably 2,500 to 7,500-dollar range.

Don Patrick: Okay. So 2,000 a year is $5.50 a day. It’s Starbucks coffee.

Brad Williams: Well, again, that 2000, and that’s the initial plan just plus that three months. So it’s not generally not a full year for that initial engagement. We do ongoing engagements that are 12 months at a time. And those generally range somewhere between 175 maybe up to 300 dollars a month.

Don Patrick: Are you using any tools for that? How are you billing?

Brad Williams: We use AdvicePay to bill for financial planning. And we have since we started with IFG.

Don Patrick: Yeah, people like that. We’re in a subscription world. So with a larger financial plan, how do you ask for all the fees upfront to say 50% now, 50% when we’re completed? What does that look like?

Brad Williams: That’s a good, yeah, we always do 50% of the entire initial plan cost at the time of engagement. The remainder is due on the day that we deliver the completed financial plan.

Don Patrick: Do you offer a guarantee?

Brad Williams: A guarantee of that day or?

Don Patrick: If they’re not happy.

Brad Williams: I haven’t offered any kind of guarantee. I haven’t had anybody not be happy. So let’s hope that always remains the case. I haven’t been in that scenario. We do use IFGs’ financial planning and consulting agreement as part of every engagement. So certainly, if we were to face a situation like that, we would have a conversation about what makes sense.

Don Patrick: So, I’ve been doing this about 40 years. I’ve always offered a guarantee and no one’s ever taken me up on it.

Brad Williams: Well, that’s good to know.

Don Patrick: Well, when you’re doing real financial planning, it’s in-depth and they get it.

Brad Williams: Yeah, I mean the feedback that I get is always, “Wow,” the comprehensive nature of what we do, and it’s funny, the things that folks seem to focus on might seem like the lowest value items from a financial planning standpoint, but the highest impact from a client point of view is something as simple as, “Wow, I noticed that your personal property coverage on your homeowner’s insurance is coverage way too high. Have you ever thought about having that adjusted and see how it affects your premiums,” or “You have the lowest possible deductibles on your auto insurance and you have a cash reserve well in excess of six months of living expenses, why not see what impact that has on your premium?”

Something as simple as the nuisance. What or what have you of paying premiums on insurance that they might not ever need, but we all know how valuable it is when you do need it. We cover all that in our financial planning process. Those are low-impact items from a future financial outcome standpoint as far as premium savings is concerned, but clients really appreciate that kind of feedback because they’re not getting it from the agents that they work with.

Don Patrick: That’s correct. So now client’s been on board, they’re a financial planning client, and they’re, you’re not managing assets. What happens in year two?

Brad Williams: Yeah, in year two, or when we reached the end of that initial engagement, I would say that most initial financial plan engagements are a four to six-month total time commitment.

A lot of that has to do with how quickly we can gather the data from that particular client. At the end of that three-month implementation period, usually about a month ahead of that, if I haven’t had the conversation already, we’ll begin a conversation about the need, if any, for an ongoing planning relationship.

And what that looks like is, again, the monthly subscription where it becomes somewhere between, say, 175, 300, maybe a little higher than that in some cases for business owners that we work with for that 12-month ongoing planning relationship and in that relationship, depending on the client, it’s somewhere between two and four face to face interactions a year.

I do an annual tax filing review for every client regardless of complexity so that we’re having at least some level of tax planning conversation that’s more complex for some clients than it is others. But we also do a progress meeting in the first, or excuse me, we actually did the strategy meeting in the first half of the year where we talk about how last year went, what’s going on this year, what’s changing, refreshing the financial plan.

And then the second half of the year, we have our progress meeting where we’re talking about how are we doing? How are things tracking towards our goals? What items have yet to be implemented that were on our goal list of things that we wanted to get done this year and what year-end planning items specifically do we need to be thinking about things that have to happen prior to December 31st and what other items say for 2024 are things that can wait to be looked at prior to tax filing in 2025.

For all the clients that are W2 folks that have comprehensive benefits, I also include an open enrollment conversation in there. That’s usually a semi-year updated benefits book, and it’s a 30 minute phone call to make sure that there’s not any substantive changes that need to be made to their various employee benefit elections.

Don Patrick: What kind of tools, if any, are you using for tax planning?

Brad Williams: For tax planning, we are using Holistiplan, which I love and am a huge proponent of, and it’s my favorite thing that we use and I can’t speak highly enough about it, and I am not a compensated endorser of Holistiplan in any way.

It really is just that great. We love the fact that we can just upload returns and it spits out data. I have gained a lot of tax planning expertise and ability to review tax returns where I do feel that I’m capable of ascertaining all of the information that a Holistiplan does, but it can do it a whole lot faster than I can.
And so I do appreciate that ability to show those tax reports. Most, there’s a huge gap in income tax understanding, and not only among just the public in general, but I feel among financial professionals as well. I would say that I’m also guilty of having kind of dismissed income tax implications only out of my own eggs or my career.

And now that I’ve made a concentrated effort to grow my income tax planning knowledge and use tools like Holistiplan, there’s a lot of great reports inside of eMoney as well that help with tax planning, along with just doing a flip through the pages myself, review of every client’s tax return has added a tremendous amount of value to what we can deliver to our clients in terms of enforcing why we’re making the recommendations we’re making and the various income tax education that comes behind that to help our clients understand what they’re doing and how it impacts them from a standpoint of tax savings or tax costs today, along with hopefully minimizing their lifetime income tax liability.

Don Patrick: That’s great. So let’s say you have a client that is a financial planning client, but you’re also managing money. Is there a fee offset or are they just totally separate fees? You have the financial planning fee and–

Brad Williams: Yes, it is possible to have both. A good example of that would be a client who is just starting to do Roth IRA contributions for the first time, say we’re doing comprehensive financial planning for them, but they allow us the ability to open those accounts for them, and they’re beginning to make contributions.

So they’re certainly paying for investment management using our normal investment management cost schedule, along with a financial planning ongoing monthly costs. that’s commensurate with the complexity of what we’re doing. As an investment relationship grows or say if someone were to bring a larger investment relationship, we would consider that as an offset.

Most of the time if we’re managing assets say of half a million dollars or greater, most of the time, financial planning can be completely included in the fees that are paid for the asset management. If we’re talking about a higher degree of complexity, we would have to have that conversation with clients and review that on a case-by-case basis.

But currently, I don’t believe we have any clients that have a 500,000 or greater investment relationship with us that are paying any additional costs for financial planning.

Don Patrick: I like that. What do you like about financial planning profession?

Brad Williams: Well, I would say that number one, it all goes back to the reason that I entered this industry to begin with. My mom was the first person in our family, Don, to ever earn any kind of income such that there was even the opportunity to save any money.
I’m a first-generation college student. That’s an accomplishment that I entirely attribute to my mom and my dad for the sacrifices that they made to provide a path that got me there. But my mom had, got a job as a part time front desk clerk associate at a hotel. Two weeks later, she was named the general manager of that property without having any prior hotel experience due to some rigmarole that was happening with a previous manager.

She’s now been a hotel general manager for more than 20 years. she was named as the best Western international GM of the year worldwide in 2009 and has just had an amazing career and I couldn’t be more proud of her, but what comes with more income is more complexity, more ability to access things in life that you may not have, having grown up with less means.

And so my mom did find herself in a situation with debt when I was in high school that led us to go meet with a family friend who was an independent financial planner in Spartanburg. And he had a conversation with us about just the very basics of managing debt and the very basics of investing. And I remember him standing next to a trifold chart and drawing out a representation of what growing assets and capital appreciation and compound it could look like and the entire concept of being able to turn your own savings into a source of income and then still having money left over potentially at the end.

That blew my mind, Don, and from the world that I come from and the way that I grew up, that’s just not knowledge that people get. And so my ability to share that knowledge and to help people who may not even realize, Don, that their ideal life is just barely out of reach, but what financial planning does is lift that veil, in my opinion, that shows people how much closer they really are to their dreams, to that ideal life, is what I refer to it as a lot.

And they might even realize, and I think that’s what we do. We inspire confidence for people to live the life that they want to live now. I talk to every client about the fact that a lot of life happens before retirement. And so we have to figure out how to strike that balance between enjoying our lives today and being fulfilled, but taking actions that are required to secure the future because neglecting one or the other is, in my opinion, really the biggest mistake anybody can make because nothing’s guaranteed for the future and we certainly don’t want to be in a position down the road where we’ve got to make major changes to lifestyle.
So it takes both to live a full and complete life.

Don Patrick: I agree. Very powerful. Any challenges you find in financial planning profession?

Brad Williams: I’d say there’s two challenges that really stand out to me when I think about that question. Number one is defining your process and having it defined such that you can truly stand by it.
It’s a tough thing to do. No matter where you’re coming from from a standpoint of financial services, building a process that’s uniquely yours and is repeatable, sustainable, scalable, and can truly provide that value and results for clients, it’s hard to do. And it’s something that takes a lot of time and it’s a process that’s never over.

I feel like I’m always trying to improve what I’m doing for clients and making that process better. I believe we have that process now where I can go to anybody anywhere and say, “I stand by what we do and this process works,” but I’m also committed to making it better all the time. So that’s number one.
The second challenge I would say is getting the message out there. There are a lot of different ways that financial advice is provided. The term financial advisor or financial planner is used very loosely among various organizations. It can mean very different things about exactly what that means and what experience that individual is providing.

And I’m not saying any of those folks are wrong in what they do. I’m just saying that it’s different and it’s difficult for the folks out there who are in need of advice to ascertain who’s the right person for them. My heart truly goes out to anybody that’s looking for a financial planner because it’s just tough to find that right
person for you and really, really trust that you’re going the right direction.

So getting that message out there, who I am, what I do, why I’m different, I’d say is a number one challenge.
Don Patrick: You seem to be doing a pretty good job of that. We’ll get into that in a little bit. In terms of your process, do you have a visual deliverable for the client that kind of shows them what it’s going to be like? Or is it all for–

Brad Williams: Yeah, I have a, I always show like a sample scope of engagement. This is what a lot of our financial planning experiences look like. I do like to share samples of the income tax report just to explain why that matters and why we do it and how it’s so important because not that many people do that type of planning.

But we don’t currently have what I’d call a pitch book, Don. I would say that I have some sample materials that are related to the financial planning process that I’ll use as sort of a guide in an introductory meeting.

But really, most of what I find is valuable for the clients that I work with is just the combat initial conversation of me really trying to listen and understand and then repeat back to somebody what I heard them say because I want to demonstrate that I truly am listening. And then directly relate what they told me into what our process is. And that’s how almost every new client relationship that I end up onboarding begins.

Don Patrick: Great. Very helpful. So when I ask a few questions here, when did you and Terrel join Integrated?

Brad Williams: So we joined in early 2021. So we just celebrated our three-year anniversary with IFG.

Don Patrick: Awesome. You guys are great.

Brad Williams: Thank you.

Don Patrick: So why did you join the consortium?

Brad Williams: I mentioned earlier when I took that role at Wells Fargo that gave me the ability to work directly with Harold on a daily basis. There were a lot of lunches that he and I had and just a lot of conversations in general as we built our professional and our personal relationship with each other.

And those conversations were about the ideal wealth management practice, how we felt like we were called to do business for the clients who we’re meant to serve. And we really think of it that way. And that led to a realization that with changes that were happening inside of Wells Fargo, and for that matter, other similar organizations and just what we were allowed to do, not allowed to do, those kinds of things that we just weren’t going to be able to practice the way we wanted to in that environment. And part of that is the ability to offer financial planning services without any expectation of investment relationship.

Part of that is the ability to have conversations like this, to be more personal in the way that we present ourselves out to the community, a lot of factors. And so we began doing a lot of research, we looked at the opportunity of going an employee model with another firm, but without the retail banking side of that.

And we just realized that was probably a lot more of the same and Terrell is the one who actually discovered IFG and had some initial conversations that he later got me involved in and IFG was what we talked about we hoped to have. We wanted to be part of an organization that, I don’t necessarily think fraternity is the right word, I think family is probably a better word, and how we support each other. And IFG, again, I would say the challenge for IFG, just the same as me, is getting that message out there and communicating in such a way that it feels genuine. Well, I can say that everything that we were told about IFG has been true.

That consortium, Brain Trust, is really a more, I would call it family. It’s a group of people who really are genuinely interested in supporting each other and their activities ‘cause we’re all in this life of running our own small businesses, but also being practitioners and serving clients regarding some of the most important aspects and most important decisions that they’ll make in their lives.

And through all of that, IFG has turned out to be exactly what we hoped it would be for us. I’ve made incredible friends. My mastermind group is an extremely valuable part of my day to day. We have a group chat. We’re almost on a daily basis. There’s something going on there that we’re talking about, whether it’s personal or professional, and supporting each other.

And just the access we have to the knowledge capital that’s available has improved my acumen as a planner and particularly as we’ve learned how to be business owners, as well, which in turn has improved our ability to serve other people out there who are self-employed and in other industries and just really adds a unique kind of nuance to the way that we practice. And IFG supports every bit of that.

Don Patrick: That’s great. I agree.

Brad Williams: Yeah, you could send me that check later. No, I’m just kidding. Again, non compensated endorser of IFG as well.

Don Patrick: So you effectively became an entrepreneur three years ago.

Brad Williams: That’s correct. Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I actually majored in entrepreneurship at the University of South Carolina.

That was a finance and management double major, but my management major had a concentration in entrepreneurship. So I had a lot of opportunities to do consulting work for real businesses, a lot of my professors were serial entrepreneurs. And so I always knew that I had that interest. I just didn’t know how it would happen.

And coming out of college, I just always thought I’d go the traditional route that people go and become advisors and be part of these big name firms. And I learned a lot along the way that my personality just wasn’t going to fit in that kind of environment. And I didn’t know a lot about independent RIAs at that time and what that could look like, and certainly didn’t know about IFG, but I’m happy that the past led me the way that it did because I think that being an entrepreneur with somebody like Terrell Boone as a friend and supporter and partner, along with all the resources that IFG provides to us to make it easier to do the work that we love.

Don Patrick: Love it. So use three words to describe your talents and strengths.

Brad Williams: You gave me a long list of words to look at, Don, and it’s funny kind of try to narrow something like that down to three, but I did, and I really actually put some thought into this and I would say that persistence, which is a word you use described me earlier when I talked about how I came to be with my wife.

So I guess persistence was a good word. I’ve always been somebody who, and again, I’ve talked about my dad and his journey with multiple sclerosis. And I always saw it every day that my dad could get out of bed and take a step was just a reminder that I’ve got no excuse to not do everything that I’m capable of doing in my life.

And so persistence, I think, comes a lot from that. I think storytelling is a particular talent or strength of mine, probably just ‘cause I love the sound of my own voice, Don, or and over the years, I think that’s developed into an ability to convey a message in a certain way or tell a joke or say something self-deprecating, whatever it might be.

I just enjoy telling stories and sharing my own experiences and figuring out how to hopefully bless others with those stories. I think the third piece is thoughtfulness. I think that comes from my mother. I talked about her being a hotel manager, but my mom is the kind of person that just notices things about people that no one else notices.

And she uses those things to help make people’s day better whatever that might be. And so there are ways and things that I just kind of pick up on or hear or remember about people. Recently we have a client who’s 93-year-old father moved into a nursing home facility and they were able to move a piano with him.

He’d been, he’d played piano his whole life, but the way his home was set up, he couldn’t get to the piano because of mobility issues. Now this piano is in his room at the nursing home and he’s playing it every day. My client’s telling me about this and I’m like, that’s awesome. I told you I have a passion for music.

And that’s incredible. This 93-year-old man for the first time in years is getting the enjoyment of playing this piano again. And my client told me about how he had played piano at various Methodist churches and I attend the Methodist church and there was a specific hymnal that he had asked for that the accompaniment version of, and I was familiar with that because I sing in the choir at church.

And I’m like, if you’re 93 years old and there’s anything in the world that you’re asking for specifically, today’s the day to get it. So I went to our organist at our church and found out exactly what I needed to get, and we ordered it and we sent it to his dad and his dad sits there and plays these hymns that he used to play for years in church.

And it just brings me so much fulfillment to think that that guy’s getting enjoyment out of something that I had at least some connection to and that we could do that for him and for our client.

Don Patrick: That’s tremendous and that’s a great story. So let’s jump into the main topic. Daryl was sharing with me that you’re just tearing it up in terms of social media marketing and having tremendous results. So tell us a little bit about it and how you’re doing it. How do you get started with?

Brad Williams: I’d say tremendous is certainly true for me. I don’t know how I stack up to others who are out there doing it better or having more success. But if I measure myself only against myself and pretty much everything else that I do.

But, you know, so about six months ago I started posting original content on just about a daily basis on LinkedIn. And I also have a Brad Williams, financial planner, professional Facebook page, the same content on both. They’re both hooked up to social patron. so it’s real easy to do. But for a long time, I followed others in our industry that seemed to be having success with social media and over the years I’ve heard a lot of advisors I’ve worked with, it just felt like it’s not worth it. Most people are putting out canned content from various marketing suites and it just doesn’t lead to a lot of business, but I always felt like with that storytelling ability that I believe that I have, that I might be able to make it work for me. And I found others out there that seem to be doing what I really thought I’d like to be doing. And I spent a lot of time searching terms like financial planning, tax planning, Roth IRA, just whatever, or common subjects that we might talk about in our industry.

And that led me to kind of identify a few folks out there that I just started following that were posting and seem to be doing well. That kind of gave me a little bit of a blueprint of what it could be. And I decided last November to take the leap of committing to, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to post something that’s out of my own head every day for a year.”

And whatever happens. And I really didn’t expect much to come of it. Most of what I had looked into said you really got to do something consistently for six months to a year before you ever start to see any traction from that. And so I never expected to have the kind of results that I’ve had.

Don, just this year I’ve onboarded six new clients that are direct results of social media leads. I’ve had 16 total leads, six of which has become clients. I’ve got several intro appointments on the calendar out there, but I’ve done a little over $11,000 of collected financial plan fees so far this year from social media leads, another million dollars in AUM.

And I’ve got some strong opportunity for some additional AUM coming behind that. The frequency of opportunity seems to be growing. My following on LinkedIn has increased from a little over 1600 people to over 2000 people. I think one of the most amazing metrics is LinkedIn will show you how many people have actually clicked on your name and looked at your profile over the last 90 days.

And that number used to be like three, maybe five people for me. As of this moment right now, it’s 685 people have clicked and viewed my profile in the last 90 days. For me, that’s great. I mean, I’m sure there are people out there that do a lot more than that, but post impressions, that’s the number of people that have seen your content.

I’ve had, my goal for this year was to do a hundred thousand post impressions in 2024. I’ve got 114,000 post impressions over the last 90 days. So that has far exceeded my expectations, my engagements, which are people liking and commenting on your posts are up thousands of a percent from what they used to be.
And what I try to do is I try to post was just one person in mind, whatever, whether it’s a detailed financial strategy, just some education around some issue, or if it’s a story related to something inspired that happened to one of my clients, I really try to be focused on if there’s one person that reads this, that it might help, then it’s worth posting and that seems to be working based on the results and outside of the client opportunities, I’ve gotten some other unusual, unexpected opportunities.

We’ve been invited to three different networking opportunities. I was invited to a networking group through the Greenville Chamber. We were invited to become a sponsor of an organization for commercial realtors in the area. And I recently got invited to go visit a BNI group next week. And these are all things that I never would have gotten invited to if it hadn’t been for the fact that other people that are connected to me were consistently seeing the type of content that I’m posting and were reminded of me when there was an opportunity to invite a quote-unquote financial advisor, financial planner, what have you to whatever organization. I never really thought that would be a by-product of this. I didn’t think getting any clients done would be a by-product of this, at least this early, but it certainly has surprised me and I really enjoy doing it.

I try to put my heart into it and to a lot of the things that I post. I try to be very transparent about me, I’ll share things about my own life, my family, and just really, I think that what ends up happening is people get a sense of who you are and they’re already beginning to build trust with you before they ever sit across from you in a conference room or on a Zoom meeting.

And I think that. That’s tremendous in our industry because building that trust is the number one factor in every relationship we have, clients. And if I can start that process earlier by having somebody watch what I’m posting for a few months before they’re like, “You know what, it’s time to meet with Brad,” then that’s worth doing.

Don Patrick: Yeah, I follow your posts. They are amazing and it is personal and there are a lot of stories and sometimes the real client stories has been very meaningful. I would encourage all of you who are listening to this to get on Brad’s LinkedIn, Brad Williams, and follow his posts. You will learn a lot about posting on social media. It’s extremely impressive and the results are amazing.

Brad Williams: Thank you.

Don Patrick: Not many people have that kind of success in social media.

Brad Williams: Well, I hope it continues. I hope it’s helping people, it’s certainly putting people in front of me that are wonderful folks that I’m glad to have the opportunity to work with.

It’s certainly a time commitment, but I would say it’s not a huge time commitment. I probably spend maybe a half hour a day at this point on social media. I don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to come up with topics. I just post about things that are going on that I’m encountering on a daily basis.

So it’s real easy to come up with subject matter. I do keep a note in my phone if I have an idea here and there, but the number one thing that from an initial standpoint is it’s not just the posting, Don, it’s my interactions with other content on the platforms. I try to post on a lot of local, the city of Greenville, when they post, I try to comment on those things or other professional organizations in the area that I’m a part of, but also other financial planners that are out there.

I try to interact with their content as well, which has led to me building some really interesting relationships. I actually have a meeting this Friday with a planner who’s out in Denver, Colorado, who saw a comment I posted about the way that I review home and auto insurance. And he reached out and said, “Would you be willing to talk about it?”

And funny enough, I was on a webinar two weeks ago where this guy’s face was on a slide as somebody who had successfully applied this process for building meaningful relationships with CPAs. And I said, “I’d love to talk to you about how I help people with property insurance, but I’d also like to hear about the success you’re having with CPAs.”

And so he and I are having a Zoom conversation on Friday and that’s another byproduct of the social media world that I would not have anticipated before I started doing.

Don Patrick: That’s amazing. And you started in November. That’s just stupendous. That’s amazing. It’s just growing exponentially. It sounds like.

Brad Williams: I hope it continues. I really enjoy doing it. And I, people come up to me at church all the time. It’s like, “Hey, I saw that thing you said about mortgages.” And whether that leads to them becoming clients or not, it’s at least letting me know that people are seeing it.

Don Patrick: Yep. That’s great. That’s fantastic. That’s a, that’s really big stuff. Well, I’m going to close this up. You’ve been a great guest, fascinating, great learning about you and very creative in so many things you’re doing in the profession. So I’ve got one last question for you and that is just to tell us something about yourself that others don’t know.

Brad Williams: Alright, well, I mentioned my love for music and whether people caught it or not early on, I did say that I played the banjo. I heard. What that ultimately led to was when I was a senior in high school, I had the opportunity to participate in a Guinness World Record event at Turner Field. I stood on the first bass line and played banjo in what is still the largest banjo ensemble performance ever to happen in the world.
And it was a tribute to the father of bluegrass banjo, Earl Scruggs, who was there. We played for him during the seventh inning stretch, and I have a certificate on the wall in my office certifying that I am indeed a participant in a Guinness World Record event.

Don Patrick: That’s amazing. I love it.

Brad Williams: Yeah. My parents let me, my parents let me use a college visit day to get me out of school that day to do it. So a big thank you to my folks for letting me use a loophole to miss a day of school.

Don Patrick: That’s incredible. I love it. Brad, you’ve been great. This is a great conversation. You’re fascinating. Doing great things.

Brad Williams: Thank you, Don.

Don Patrick: I really want to thank you for your time.

Brad Williams: I appreciate it. I appreciate being invited and I think that this podcast is a great idea and I look forward to hearing all the rest of them.

Don Patrick: Okay. See you, Brad.

Well, that’s it for today’s show. Thanks for listening.

If you’ve got something to share, send an email to dpatrick@thebraintrust.net. We want to know what works.

Until next time. See ya.