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: Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode number eight of the IFG podcast, What Works. We have over 2000 years of experience. I said 1000, I was corrected. And our guest today is Mike Tarrant. He’s the founder of Tarrant Financial Advisors here in Atlanta, Georgia. Mike, welcome.

Mike Tarrant: Hey Don, thank you very much. Happy to be here today.

Don Patrick: Oh, great. We’re happy to have you. So, let’s learn a little bit about you to kind of get the conversation going. Tell us a little about your family. I know a couple of big things about your two boys that are extraordinary, but I’ll just shut up and tell us about your family.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, no, thanks. Yeah. So, I’m a rare Atlanta native. I’m born and raised here in Marietta and living in Roswell right now. And Janine and I have been married for 33 years. We’re college sweethearts, met at Valdosta State University back when I was in college there. So we have two boys, shouldn’t say boys anymore, they’re young men.

My younger son Daniel is 20 and my older son Jonathan is 24. You were probably referring to them both being Eagle Scouts, which they both earned that rank and allowed us to do a lot of really cool things together as they were growing up over the years. Jonathan is a recent graduate of Kennesaw State University, computer science with a specialty in AI, and kind of given the difficulties of the job market right now, he is working some temporary work with Best Buy, but he’s made a step toward where he’s headed.
So we’re proud of him for that. And Daniel’s about to enter his third year of college and he decided to go back to our alma mater. So he’s down at Valdosta State as well, which is kind of cool.

Don Patrick: That is. That’s great. I mean, to make Eagle Scout is extraordinary. There’s so many distractions and pressures when you’re in high school and to complete that is just, it’s tremendous. And both of them to do that is extraordinary. 33 years.

Mike Tarrant: Yes sir, 33. We celebrated back on July 6th, so we chose a July wedding because all of our college friends picked the June dates and they were in our wedding. So kinda we had to go with that to get everybody there. But yeah, we’ve been together pretty much ever since our third year of college.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic. So tell us a little bit about how you got started in the profession. You are a great financial planner. I know all that, but just give us a little history how you got stumbled into this profession and, yeah, always very interesting.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah. Thanks. And you’re kind of correct on I’d kind of did stumble into it.
So, way back when I was in college, I went to college, majored in business because I thought I was going to go into youth ministry and work within churches. And so all my mentors at the time had said, “You better major in business because you’re never going to learn about that in seminary.” So I took their advice and did that.

And my family kind of grew up, middle of the road, kind of good blue-collar type work. My dad serviced heavy-duty office equipment machines with 3M company. He could fix anything he could touch. And my mom was a registered nurse and decided to be a stay-at-home mom while we were older.

So, we never did without, I won’t go to say that. So we just were never very affluent. And I observed early on how money could be a struggle for folks. So kind of tying that off into how I wound up in financial planning, I did a stint as a summer youth pastor at a church down in Fayetteville, Georgia, and I loved it.
It was just phenomenal. I loved working with the kids but I left that realizing that it really wasn’t what I wanted to do full time. And I was like, well, what do I do with these two degrees in economics and finance?

And I remembered how money can be one of the top two reasons for marriages to end in divorce.

And I was like, well, if I can find a way to help people with their finances, maybe I can improve relationships and help people have better lives. So I started to investigate how would I go about that. And turned out the pastor I worked with down there in Fayetteville introduced me to his financial planner who eventually hired me as an administrative assistant. So that was all back in 1992. That’s really how I got my start in the business, and then just continued to work my way up in their practice was mentored by two of the senior partners who taught me a lot about financial planning and investments and insurance and estate planning and so forth.

Became a paraplanner there, ended up running one of the senior partner’s practices for a while. And then in 1998, began to start taking clients of my own through kind of an internal buyout of some of his clients and have tried to grow the practice ever since. But that’s how I got started into it, Don.

Don Patrick: So what was the timeline like you were an administrative assistant for about how long?

Mike Tarrant: That was about two years. Yep, about two years for that. And I was doing all things administrative like opening accounts, placing trades, setting up distributions, contributions, things like that. And I was doing some basic meeting prep for the lead paraplaner there within the practice.
So that was about the first two years. And then, I served as the paraplaner for really five all total, but three of that was fully as a paraplanner. The second half of that was kind of in both roles as I was becoming an advisor, but also working as a paraplanner for the senior advisor.

Don Patrick: So it was about seven years before you really were managing clients.

Mike Tarrant: Right. That’s about right.

Don Patrick: Yeah. And that’s about the right timeline. First of all, it’s a whole new language.

Mike Tarrant: Totally. Absolutely.

Don Patrick: RMD.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, right. So many acronyms.

Don Patrick: Every profession, especially ours. And so were you with a broker-dealer, RIA? What was that setup like?

Mike Tarrant: So, believe it or not, I’ve almost always been hybrid and independent. So, we were, back then we were duly registered with a broker-dealer, Financial Network Investment Corp.

Don Patrick: Oh, yeah.

Mike Tarrant: And we all, yep, you remember them. And then the firm had its own RIA that it ran the financial planning through. Now, in the 90s, they were not doing managed money per se. They had moved from A shares to using C shares for the 1% revenue.

And then we’re tiptoeing their way into advisory into the late nineties, but they were always duly registered.
And that allowed us to charge financial planning fees under the RIA. And then we would handle investments with custom portfolios kind of in that brokerage environment, but utilizing C shares for everything.

Don Patrick: Yeah, that’s because there weren’t many choices out there. The Schwab Marketplace I think was just getting started if I remember right and it was very limited at the time. So that’s the first seven years, then what?

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, true. So yeah, now that gets us up to like 98, 99. So you know, I began taking on clients from the senior partner. And it began networking within my own network for some clients and began to take people on. It got to where we knew it was time for me to be solo when I just could not do both jobs well.

There just was not enough time in the day. And so, at the end of 1998 was when I stopped working for a salary as a paraplanner and began working for whatever I could generate as an advisor.

So we had about a one-year transition of, you know, from half salary down to quarter salary down to no salary. And then after, in 1999, I was a hundred percent of my own revenue from that point forward.

Don Patrick: Was that scary for you or were you comfortable with it?

Mike Tarrant: It was both, if that makes sense. It was scary in the sense of, wow, I’ve really got to make this work to put some food on the table. But thankfully it was just Jeanine and me. We haven’t, didn’t have kids yet. But at the same time, it was exciting because I was in my twenties, I was fired up and I’m like, I’m either going to make it work. It’s like it’s now or never. I’m at the age and the stage where I can really work hard and make this work. And if it doesn’t, we’ll find something else to do. And if it was meant to be, it’s going to work out fine.

Don Patrick: And how did you go about client acquisition at that time?

Mike Tarrant: At that time, believe it or not, I was caught, I was letting the clients I had acquired from a mentor know that I was building my practice and I was open to referrals or introductions and they were more than happy to help me build the practice.

And so they were referring people to me. So I would ask existing clients for help with that. And the other marketing idea that I was running with was what we used to call a wine and cheeser. So at some key clients’ homes, we would host like a wine and cheese social at night or something and ask them to bring colleagues or co-workers.

And the idea would be for them to provide Whatever the audience liked to eat or drink. I would do maybe a 10-minute commercial about who we are and what we’re doing. And other than that, it was a hundred percent social hour. So we did a couple of those and that actually brought in two to three clients.

So just organically tried to work it that way. Didn’t really do seminars then I really did those socials.

Don Patrick: So from the very beginning, you were actually asking for introductions or referrals. I don’t know what kind of language you use, but most advisors are very uncomfortable with that.

Mike Tarrant: I was, and the reason it worked so well was I already had relationships with those clients because I had been working as their paraplanner and so they already knew me.
And they knew the work that I could do and we were presenting this as kind of a team approach with me and the senior planner that if anything complicated arose that I could not handle or didn’t know the answer to, we’d bring him in. And so they were very comfortable with that. So I think really the relationship is what made that work.

And so the way to kind of, that I went about it, which I think just worked pretty well, probably still would today, is not to say, “Hey, who’s five people that you know that might need us?” It’s just, you know, “We’re expanding our business. We’re still open for clientele. If you like what we’re doing, could you introduce us to someone?”

And kind of couch it that way. But when I was younger in my twenties like that, and these folks just, they knew I was building the business, it was obvious. So they were like, “How can we help?” And I was like, and I just said, “Well, you can introduce me to folks. Maybe we go to lunch and meet one another. And you can just tell them what I’ve done for you, and if they like it, we’ll talk further.”

Don Patrick: So what was the demographic or the age group of these clients, roughly on average?

Mike Tarrant: Upper 30s, young 40s. They were about 10 years older than me.

Don Patrick: Okay. So they’re, you’re close in age.

Mike Tarrant: And some of them were in their late 50s. We basically transitioned to about 10 households in the early days and it was a wider range, but yeah, there were some older clients too that we were able to work with that way. So I was able to bring in some pre-retirees and the younger generation that was still working and accumulating.

Don Patrick: So they were comfortable working with a 20-something-year-old.

Mike Tarrant: They were. Yeah, they were.

Don Patrick: It was a team approach. It had proven your worth. And I’ve always said that it’s more between the ears with advisors. And if they’re 28 and they’re working with a 60-year-old, how old do you think their doctor is when he gets out of medical school, for example?

Mike Tarrant: Yeah. Very true. Very true.

Don Patrick: And how long were you with this firm?

Mike Tarrant: That’s right, I need to do a little bit of math. Let’s see, we were, I was with that firm until 2004. So that would be roughly 12 years with that firm. And then there was what I would call a “partnerectomy”. The partnership kind of came apart and I had to make a decision about where I would go. So I ended up deciding to remain with my lead mentor who I’d been working with all those years. So essentially it was still the same broker-dealer, but we moved out of the main office, started a different RIA. But realistically, from a client perspective, it was a change of an address.

We didn’t even have to change broker-dealers, it was a change of an address, little downsizing of the office because it was just three or four lead advisors, including me, and some support team. That’s generally, I was with him, up until, well, realistically, until I moved over to IfG back in 2015. So, I was with Bill for probably well over 20 years.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic.

Mike Tarrant: Three broker-dealers in between. Yeah, there were broker-dealer changes, so when I joined IfG, one of my criteria was wherever I land, it needs to be the last one.

Don Patrick: And what year was that when you joined IfG?

Mike Tarrant: Year in 2015.

Don Patrick: And what was some of your decision-making process like in making that decision? I know it was a biggie for you. It was a biggie.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, that was a big decision because the senior partner was really, he was trying to retire and sell his practice. And that’s a whole conversation about succession planning and planning for all the planning that we were so good at, the succession planning did not go well at all.

I had a really hard time getting that nailed down with him. So, at the end of the day, he ended up selling the practice, or his practice, to a national planning company, and I did not want to be an employee, so I spent about a year going through due diligence with him to make sure that his deal worked out right, that he and his wife would be okay and land where they needed to, however, I knew that I wanted to land in an independent space.

I wanted to be part of a larger group. I did not want to be the top producer. I wanted to be somewhere in the middle or upper two-thirds so that I could learn from larger producers, advisors with bigger practices, and, well, learn from everybody actually, and then help wherever I could help.

So, that was a big criteria for me, Don. I was very much interested in a self-clearing firm, honestly. Because I had worked my entire career with correspondence and I had just grown tired of calling the broker-dealer with a question and they would call and have to call me back or whomever.

We wanted to be able to go straight to the source, but I knew I wanted to be part of a larger group where I could learn things and also help at the same time and have some support for my practice to help it grow.

Don Patrick: So, this was a big transition, a big decision. Was it also kind of scary?

Mike Tarrant: That was. Yeah. That was. I would say that was a little more nerve-wracking to me and to Janine than launching on my own back in 98, 99. We wanted to land well, land in a good place. Wanted it to have a lot of good people and we really didn’t want to have to do it again. So, there was a lot of pressure to get it right, so to speak.

So I’ve spent a lot of time interviewing a lot of hybrid firms and a lot of kind of fee only type firms but my practice has always had a mixture of advisory and brokerage and annuities and life insurance and so forth so the fee-only route really wasn’t going to work for me. So turned out that one of the fee-only firms I spoke with—so I’d known this fella for a long time and he said, “Well, we would love to have you, but you’d have to let about a third of your business go.”

And he said, “So, but I know this guy down at IfG, Integrated Financial Group, named Land Bridgers. And I had known of land from his wills days.” And, believe it or not, I contacted Land. I was not on Land’s radar.

So I contacted Land out of the blue and told him what was happening. And, We hit it off pretty well, and I like the IfG story quite a bit. You took me about what, 11 months or so to transition, but that was really because we’re not to transition, but to make the decision because I was trying to help my mentor land well first. So I claim the second longest decision process behind Mark Smith.

Don Patrick: So you know about that.

Mike Tarrant: I do.

Don Patrick: And how did your transition go in terms of client retention and that sort of thing?

Mike Tarrant: It went very well. I will have to admit it went very well, probably better than expected. So any of the few clients I did not retain were a few that I chose to leave behind.

Don Patrick: That’s great.

Mike Tarrant: And these tended to be more of the uber small brokerage variety where I didn’t have a great relationship with. And I notified them via email of what was happening and suggested that they remain with the current firm, which I think most of them did. But realistically, I retained pretty much all of my business. It took us probably a solid six months to transition all of it. You know how that goes. At the time, Carmen was running point on transitions and she helped us with everything we needed. We all, it was all branch net then it wasn’t client works, so, my team and I–

Don Patrick: Mustard yellow screen.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, the mustard yellow screen. Now, the transition went very well. It was perceived, we marketed the transition as an upgrade to the practice. A lot of my clients had known my mentor, so they knew he was retiring. So we marketed it accordingly. And most of my clients viewed that as an upgrade in the practice that we were moving into a larger practice with more advisors that we could network with and bring in to help us when needed. So generally it was perceived as an upgrade.

Don Patrick: Great. And it generally is an upgrade when folks join the Brain Trust. And what we’ve learned in all the transitions we’ve been involved in is when you’re doing real financial planning, you have very deep relationships with the clients. They trust you. It’s our job to find the best outside vendors we can, whether it’s a broker-dealer, RIAs, all these things.
It’s our job to do that. And, so your experience is actually quite typical of a financial planner. But during the pre-transition time, people don’t believe that.

Mike Tarrant: No. No, they don’t.

Don Patrick: Oh, that’s great. and what a great addition you’ve been, so we know how, why you got into the profession, which I find the commonality with good financial planners is they love helping people, they love educating them, and that seems the biggest common theme. In terms of running the business, because you really became a true business owner when you made this transition, what do you think are some of your bigger challenges running a business?

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, that’s a great question. I had to actually think about this for a few minutes. I think with me and my temperament, one of my larger challenges is realistically time management and administration and staying on top of my client emails and things like that. So leveraging my team for that is huge.

Staying current, there’s so much happening within the investment world and with taxes and whatnot.

Staying current can be a challenge, and this will sound somewhat odd, but actually building relationships is a little bit of a challenge for me. I’m kind of a combination introvert extrovert.
I can get in the weeds pretty quickly and get lost there if I’m not careful. So I have to work very hard to make sure I’m developing relationships well with my clients and staying in touch with them and so forth ‘cause I really like to get things done and it’s easy to lose sight of the people that you’re getting things done for, if that makes sense.

So, that’s a large challenge, but realistically at the moment, our biggest challenge is workflow. Our marketing has gone very well. Our referrals are stronger than expected. And Charlie and I are having bandwidth issues, so we are working through processes again and expanding his role within the practice to take some of that off of me and free up some time that way.

That’s really the biggest one we’re looking at. I would have said in my other firm that compliance would be a major challenge. However, I can tell you with the growth of IfG’s compliance team, that is not a worry for me. I find that we are very much able to focus on a lot more of what we do well because of that.
But yeah, if I had to sum that up, challenges are time, administration, staying current, building relationships. I tend to pile on too many projects, so I have to be very careful not to overload the team as well.

Don Patrick: We’ve noticed.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, I’m sure. I know my monthly invoice from ASAP tells me that too.

Don Patrick: Yeah, so that kind of leads into how you’ve structured the staffing of your business and what that looks like and Charlie’s role as well.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve always been one that needs help. I’m not afraid to admit that. But in the early days, and I know a lot of advisors are this way, we want to control everything.
We want to make sure all the T’s are crossed, the I’s are dotted, the clients are taken care of. Everything is perception, right? And even though we may be behind the scenes opening accounts or whatnot, from the client’s side, how well we do that reflects on the quality of the practice and the service we provide.

So it’s tough for advisors to give that up, right? But I learned from the mentor in the early days that, kind of like Moses, I can’t do everything and I’m going to have to delegate to people who can. So having grown up in the business as a delegatee, I kind of learned what that looked like and how to do that with the team, but what I love about having a team is not so much finding things that I don’t have time to do, it’s creating jobs that fit people who love that kind of work. And empowering a team, empowering people to do something that they are meant to do, that they are uniquely talented to do and have the temperament for to me is pretty exciting. So when you kind of get the right people in the right seats, so to speak, the team really
excels and really grows and really good things happen.

So long way of saying the way I’ve built the team through a lot of trial and error like a lot of other advisors it took me about four or five years to kind of come up with a really good game plan there. Charlie works with me as a paraplanner so I basically figured I needed to duplicate myself first in the sense of have someone on the team that can back me up for client questions and general things that he’d be qualified to handle and also help prepare me for financial planning meetings and reviews and help oversee the portfolio. Then from there, it was adding administrative team members who can handle the back office. So I’ve really broken the practice down into front stage and backstage.

Backstage is handled by the ASAP team and they’re fully trained for everything that we need and they do a great job with that. And frontstage would be my paraplanner and me that are forward-facing with clients and working on financial plans and investments in the deliverables we provide.

Don Patrick: And in terms of investments, I know, well, tell us about how you’re building models. Are you outsourcing that? Are you doing the training? Do you outsource that? What does that look like?

Mike Tarrant: A mixture of both, but primarily, we use the models provided by Alpha Capital within the IfG program. We have customized that a little bit with one or two additional holdings in the portfolio, but at this point, Don, probably 80% of my advisory business is within that program. I love to standardize and then within that, customize it for the client. So our investments are a lot with Alpha, a pretty good bit with the Manager Access Select, using the couple of the SMAs and IfG handles the trading for the Alpha accounts, Charlie handles the trading, kind of the one-off type stuff. But that’s typically how we’re handling the portfolios at this point.

Don Patrick: So you’re only real employee is Charlie and then you’ve outsourced the virtual team and investment solutions, that sort of thing.

Mike Tarrant: Right. Yeah, I’m a hybrid of that, of staffing. Yeah, Charlie’s my only sole really direct hire. Everything else is outsourced from ASAP to marketing to accounting. Everything else is outsourced.

Don Patrick: Great. So tell us a little bit about your tech stack. What do you use for financial planning? Do you use things such as Riskalyze, CRM? What does that look like?

Mike Tarrant: I’ve probably got the basics that most others have, Don. I’m using eMoney Advisor for our financial planning software. I’ve probably actually used it for over 15 years. So we brought that with us when we moved over to IfG. Redtail for the CRM is working pretty well for us. I mean, it’s got its bumps and bruises, but generally, it’s working pretty well. And Riskalyze has been a key component of the C Share conversions I did when I first moved over to IfG.

That was a great tool to have in place for modeling the current versus the new portfolio for clients. So we use these quite a bit. We are also using a list to plan for tax planning for certain clients when that’s called for. And occasionally BizEquity for business valuation with the financial planning purpose tied to it. But those are the ones we mainly use. I’m probably forgetting something, but those are the biggies.

Don Patrick: Gotcha. So Riskalyze was significantly important in that conversion process. Here’s what you have. Here’s what we suggest you should go to.

Mike Tarrant: Right. And my philosophy with software is, yes, I would like the numbers to look reasonably accurate, but I know they’re all projections.

But realistically, they are tools to tell stories. That’s how I view those. So with Riskalyze, for example, it’s all about setting expectations where the client can visually see how they should expect their portfolio to behave, maybe compared to what they owned prior to. So that’s why it was a good tool for us because it was very visual in nature.

Same thing with Emoney, very visual in that. So we don’t go too deep into a lot of the numerical projections, but we like to focus on the more visual aspects of the presentation.

Don Patrick: So you do these on a screen as opposed to printing out a book, or how does that look?

Mike Tarrant: It’s on a screen now. So yeah, I became a student of Paul Peeler for a while, tried to be as simple as I could, and Karen Lee as well. So we’ve honed our agendas down to about a one-and-a-half-page outline of bullet points that we want to cover. And we customize that based on the meeting. But everything else is on screen.

One thing I do is I really like to remember what I told a client. So after the meeting, I will download what was on the screen into a PDF and we will save that into a client meeting folder. ‘Cause there’s nothing worse than a client, you meeting with the client a year later and you show them the eMoney success rate and they say, “Oh, well, last year it was 98%. Why is it 72% this year?” I want to know going in what I’d showed them before so that I can frame that conversation. So that’s probably a tip I’d give folks if you’re not doing that is save what you showed, even though you might not deliver it, you may need to refer back to it, but it saved my bacon quite a bit.

Don Patrick: Yeah, we’ve been doing that for years. We have a folder for every year for the progress review meetings and everything that was utilized is in there, even the agenda and action items, those kinds of things.

Mike Tarrant: And the eMoney Vault is great for that too, by the way. You can share that with your clients and then you can direct traffic to eMoney that way by letting them know that all the reports we cover are uploaded to your vault.

Don Patrick: What percent of your clients you think actually go into the vault?

Mike Tarrant: Well, I wish I had a good number on that, but I can tell you from the notifications I see, I think
we’re running about 35% buy-in with that.

Don Patrick: That’s good.

Mike Tarrant: It’s pretty high. Yeah.
Don Patrick: That’s very good. So walk us through what onboarding looks like for a new client in terms of meeting cadence and what you call the meetings.

Mike Tarrant: Likely a little more of a lead time than some would have. I like to take it a little slower so the clients are more comfortable, but it’s probably just more of a personality function. So usually I’ll start with like an introductory phone call or a Zoom meeting. We may, we’ll move from that into what I call a concept meeting, which is really where most people start. It’s, you know, get to know each other, hear what’s on their mind, lay out how the practice works, engage if there’s interest in going deeper, or if they’re ready to engage. If we’re engaged from the concept meeting, we move straight to an onboarding meeting from there.

We have some templates that we use for preparing for those meetings. This is where Charlie takes over as paraplanner. He will work with the client to collect the information that we need with our checklist, help them upload information to the vault. He’ll set up the Emoney portal. Then we conduct an onboarding meeting, which is where we kind of review that, see what we’re missing with the client, redefine the priorities just so we’re on the same page.

A lot of times it feels like that step can be skipped. However, I would say that’s probably the most important part of the process is having that one little check-in because the client kind of gets the first view there of everything they have and what we’re going to bring to the table. And then redefining those priorities really helps them feel confident about the direction that they’ve set with the financial plan, not so much the direction that we’ve set.

Don Patrick: Yeah. It reinforces the fact you are actually listening.

Mike Tarrant: Right. Right. So we break it down into what I call 90-day milepost. We’re just trying to take this really big project and break it down into manageable pieces. So we’ll flow from concept meeting to onboarding meeting.

After that is the financial overview, which is really like the state of the family. What are you on progress for toward retirement or independence, toward education, kind of big picture of where are things at, where do they need to go so that we can drill down on what we focus on next?

So that’s really the foundation of the plan. After that, the next station would be the investment planning meeting, which is where we tie all the investments into the plan, provide specific recommendations either for accounts to be moved under our management or say for 401k is held off-site or something like that.
From there, we’ll move into the safety review, which is all things risk management, estate planning, insurance planning, things like that, even down to property and casualty reviews. That can actually break out into a couple of meetings if you really have to get into policies and proposals and things like that.
So the whole process can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months to do the comprehensive plan from start to finish, but by breaking it down into these chunks, it’s become very manageable. And we tell clients, “We’re just going to help you on two or three topics at a time, help you get these done from start to finish, move on to the next set, and when 12 months are up, your plans should be done.” So that’s kind of our flow.

Don Patrick: Very in-depth. So are you charging separate fees for your plans?

Mike Tarrant: We do. Yes, we do. That’s one thing I learned early on in my career was to charge for the financial planning work up front and get paid for that and let the investment management kind of be a separate service, if you will, and not to tie the planning to getting paid for the portfolio, there’s no guarantee the money moves.

Now I have observed there’s many advisors who are really great at onboarding assets and doing the planning. Every time I’ve tried that, Don, I’ve never gotten the money to move. It’s just never worked for me. So I started leading with the financial planning retainer. When I’m asked by a client, “Well, do you waive that if I bring the portfolio over?”

I tell them, “No, I don’t.” And the reason is I don’t know how to invest your money until I write the financial plan. And besides, your portfolio is not going to move over here for another three, six months anyway, so we’re going to be midway through your plan or almost done with your plan before we even move the portfolio.

I found that most people resonate with that. At least the ones that I speak with. And year two and beyond, they may not have the financial planning fee. That depends on how many assets they have, but upfront, we’re charging planning fees for the work.

Don Patrick: And how do you determine or gauge the planning fee? Do you have a published fee schedule? Do you just kind of swag it? Do you have a minimum? What does that look like?

Mike Tarrant: I do have a published schedule. And we tried to base it on the amount of hours we think we might put into a plan, but we’re not really tied to that. So, at the moment, our rate schedule would be 3,500 dollars for like a single person.

4, 500 for a married couple or a cohabitating couple. And then, 5500 to 6500 for a business owner. Just cause they all have different levels of complexity that come in the mix there. I will adjust that up or down based on how complex the situation looks. So we’ve charged less and we’ve charged significantly more.

But it’s usually, that’s the official part where I will estimate it, kind of swag it a little bit, is maybe look at a percentage of net worth or a percentage of income and kind of add those two numbers together and see if it makes sense, you know, at the amount of time we’re going to put in there. And it generally comes out to be pretty close to what the published rate is.

Don Patrick: And how do you collect these fees?

Mike Tarrant: We use AdvicePay for that. So we send an invoice, we divide it by four and send an invoice once a quarter for the first year. So we’re following that 90-day milepost that we look at with the plan structure.

So realistically we’re tying it to each meeting. And we work with IfG, it’s a bookkeeper with that, but we run that through AdvicePay.

Don Patrick: Okay. That’s a great tool. So now I’m an onboarded client. I’ve been with you in terms of progress review meetings, what’s the cadence like and what are those meetings like, in terms of agenda items and also in terms of financial planning billing?

Mike Tarrant: Oh, sure. Yeah. So once we’re, once you’re an established client, at a minimum, we like to do an annual financial plan update. We follow a checklist for that. So we would typically cover progress toward retirement, progress toward education, all the bigger strategic goals that they have.

About every two or three years, we’ll read through the estate documents, see if there’s an update that needs to be made, review the insurance portfolio again. Some of these items you don’t need to do every year, but some you need to every two or three years they need to be dusted off. So we kind of, we look at the master checklist, we prepare for that and decide this time around what we need to cover.

We also send a pre-meeting questionnaire to the client and ask them to tell us what’s on their mind. And that does really drive the agenda. So we want to make sure that we’re covering what’s on their mind too. For the segmentation of the client base, like a super A or an A client, we’re going to see them two to three times a year and do more like mid-year check-ins.

But at least once a year, we want to do a deeper dive into the plan review. That’s kind of the cadence of how we flow with that. So we don’t really batch the meetings throughout the year. We just try to keep everybody on a cycle ‘cause it may take you what, three months to schedule a client sometimes.
Yeah. You know how that goes. So we kind of keep track of it that way to where if we see a client say in June, we’ll tag them again for next June kind of thing, as opposed to trying to keep them in a certain quarter. This flows better for us.

Don Patrick: So you charge an initial planning fee. Do you continue to charge that fee on an ongoing basis? How does that look like? And what does that conversation like?

Mike Tarrant: We do that for a certain segment of the clients and generally for a client, like a single client who has 1 million or less under advisement and like a couple that may have less than 2 million, we will probably charge a smaller financial planning fee.

The way we tee that up is to say, and we define this up front in the engagement stage that we say like, “In year two and beyond, here’s probably what this is going to look like for you. For ongoing planning, annual deep dives, et cetera, this is what we expect your rate to be. Once you cross these advisory thresholds, that goes away.”

And more often than not, that flies pretty well. So what I haven’t done is increased my advisory rates so that I could do away with these, but we pay careful attention to when a client crosses that advisory threshold. We make sure that retainer goes away.

Don Patrick: Okay, so you’ve clearly segmented your clients in terms of service and pricing, that sort of thing, it sounds like.

Mike Tarrant: Clearly is a stretch. We’re in the midst of this, so we have segmented them in terms of assets and revenue and kind of where we draw lines of, say, A, B, and C clients. We are still defining all of the services. But, in general, what we do know is like A clients, we will see them at least two to three times a year.

A B client, at least once a year. And then, as needed, in between. A C type client might be an email review.
Or maybe Charlie reaches out to see if they need to talk about anything. So, that’s really how we’re working that at the moment.

Don Patrick: Okay. So, I do know you have a tremendous amount of expertise both in estate planning and business planning. Is that a yes?

Mike Tarrant: That’s a yes. That’s a yes.

Don Patrick: You get into some very sophisticated, complex planning I’m aware of.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, and that comes from really the focus on pharmacy that I’ve had for 22 years and a lot of
those folks own businesses so a lot of the business planning work and the estate work I’ve been privileged to do has morphed out of that.

Don Patrick: So that leads to kind of the main topic with you. I call it niche marketing. We talk about finding a niche. It’s very difficult for most planners, other than I’m working with retirees or pre-retirees, which isn’t a very super-defined niche, but how did you stumble into this? It was like, “I’m going to go target pharmacist and that’s going to be my niche.” I mean, how did that come about?

Mike Tarrant: How did this happen? Desperation. I was coming off the Y2K bubble bursting, right? In 2000, 2001. And the practice was doing okay. It wasn’t quite enough for Janine and I to accomplish some of our goals so I was like, “Well, I need to figure out a way to really ramp this up and bring more clients into the practice and just grow more revenue.” So I wrote down a goal of 250,000 dollars and printed it and stuck it to my computer monitor and underneath it, I think this came from Nick Murray and I wrote down underneath it, “What does that mean to you?” Because I think financial planning is much more than just about the money. It’s really about what that can do for people and what it means to them and what it represents and there’s hopes and dreams tied to it. So, for us, what that meant was if I could have that much revenue in my practice way back then my wife wouldn’t have to work. That’s literally what it meant.

Don Patrick: That’s a motivator.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah. Not that she was like ready to quit, it’s just we were about to have kids and stuff and she’s like, “Well, at some point I may want to stay home.” So we were like, “Well, what does that take?” It’s going to take that. I started looking for, “Well, how can I do this?”

And I went back through the clientele and I kind of felt like I had leveraged as much as I could, from the existing clients for introductions and referrals. So I went to, this is going to be really old school, Don. You’re going to love it. The old company had a book library in the back corner and I went back there and pulled out the Millionaire Next Door and yep, I read that book cover to cover.

I made a bunch of notes, and one of the biggest themes in there was for advisors to identify a niche that might already exist within their client base, and then become an expert in that niche, learn what their pain points are, find out how to connect to that niche, and then talk about how you can help with those pain points.

And I did that. So I went back through my client base and found I have two pharmacists. That was it. There was only two and it was a father and a son. So there was no other commonality in my practice other than a few folks that worked for one employer and owned some stock options. So within that pharmacy, that umbrella there with the father and the son, I contacted both of them and just asked them, “What are some issues you like us to address this coming year?”

And they wanted to transition the business. So the idea became, let’s figure out how to transition the business from father to son. Make sure mom and dad are going to be okay after they sell it and that son can actually make the payments. So we spent two years working through that financial plan, worked with the accountant and the attorney to set up a structure that would work for them tax efficiently.

Ended up like with kind of a 10-year owner finance type situation. So to kind of tie that off a little bit more, it came to where I just asked him, I said, “Look, I really enjoyed working with y’all on this. How can I get a little deeper into the pharmacy profession?” ‘Cause there are people you can introduce me to and they helped me connect with the local association here in Georgia, the Georgia Pharmacy Association.

So I literally, Don, followed the outline that was in that book and got to know people in the association, set up meetings. went to lunches, breakfast, just asked, “Tell me more about the profession, more about the pain points. Where can I plug in to help?” And I found that they were very open to those conversations because no other advisor had really come in asking where they could help. They’d always come in asking what they could sell. So that was a different approach to take and it allowed me to get into some doors.
Don Patrick: Fantastic. That’s how you do it. What are some of the challenges, common challenges you’ve found with pharmacists? Well, one, most of them are, that you’re dealing with are business owners, correct?

Mike Tarrant: Two-thirds of them are business owners. The other one-third is they’re kind of a chain pharmacy employee. Common challenges would be health, number one. They’re on their feet all day. We’ve learned that osteo issues develop earlier, so we have to address long-term care sooner than most people would expect.

Yeah. So that’s typically a big issue for them. Number two is time because they just work so many long hours. There’s hardly any time for them to separate from the business or the practice to focus on their financial life or on their financial plan. Those are a lot of the big challenges they face.
In the independent space, it’s cost compression. We think we don’t control our revenue. They have no, almost no control over it. Their revenue is dictated by insurance companies, by Medicare, Medicaid, and then what they pay for their inventory. And it’s not uncommon for there to be a negative reimbursement for medication for independent pharmacists.

So they’re dealing with a lot of revenue constraints at the same time. Last, I would say, is the age demographic is very much like it is in our profession where there is a wide range of older pharmacists looking to sell or retire from their practices and there’s not as many young people coming into the profession. So how do you exit? That’s a big challenge.

Don Patrick: Yes. So you started going to the Georgia Pharmacy Association, asking questions, digging in, what are the pain points, all this. How did you start growing the niche? Did you do speaking engagements? What did that look like?

Mike Tarrant: That is how it looked. I attended as many meetings as I could. So the annual convention, semi-annual meetings, regional meetings. Tried to really be present everywhere so people would become familiar with me and really not go away, but to be persistent with that. So I asked for speaking engagements whether it was at a college or at one of these region meetings or at an annual convention, and I was allowed to do some of that in the early days.

We could provide pharmacists CE for that. That’s not so much available now because we’re considered practice management. but I did a good amount of seminars, I would write some articles for their trade journal and just make sure that when–I would advertise in their magazine. So we just tried, I tried to be everywhere that I could be, but the biggest successor was being present at the meetings and trying to have speaking engagements even if it was a five-minute commercial at the meeting, just always trying to say something in front of somebody.

Don Patrick: So you became known as the financial planner who is an expert in pharmacy.

Mike Tarrant: I did. I did. That’s been a blessing, but yeah, within Georgia especially, just because I’ve been present in their association for so many years and at so many events. I’m highly recognized now and it’s quite an honor. It’s quite humbling, honestly, and I wasn’t expecting that.

Don Patrick: Well, you work for it.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, for sure.

Don Patrick: Very deliberate.

Mike Tarrant: And that was something I learned was, if I’m leaving advice about niche marketing, it is to become the expert in that niche as best as–know as much about that profession as you can so that when they start speaking the jargon, you actually understand it. Of course, if you don’t, it makes for a great conversation because they are more than happy to educate you about their pain points.
Don Patrick: So obviously you’ve grown this niche significantly. It’s a big part of your business, your practice. it didn’t happen overnight. So how long do you think before you started getting some real traction with this?

Mike Tarrant: Oh wow, Don, man, it was at least two years, at least two years, maybe three. Yeah, I was doing all of this stuff and not really getting a lot from it until about 2003, 2004. And it really was about persistence.

I cannot stress that enough. When the folks started saying, “You know what, Mike, I want to sit down and talk with you.” And I’d ask them, I’d say, “I really appreciate that. What’s helped you reach this decision?” They’re like, “Well, you’re still here.” And what they meant was people would come in there and try to sell something and then they would leave, so it was very important for there to be consistency to know that you were real, you were permanent, you were going to stick around, and you were dependable. And so yeah, it took two or three years of that before we really started seeing some people onboarding with us.
Don Patrick: So if you find a niche, it’s not a silver bullet overnight and it takes a lot of work and persistence.

Mike Tarrant: Right, right. And if I had to do that over again today, I would probably go with a similar methodology, but I know the method of communicating might be completely different.

Just bearing in mind in the early 2000s, email was still kind of the only technology we were using besides a telephone. No smartphone, no social media, none of that. So it was a lot of in-person type stuff, but I think you can take some of the concepts and translate those into modern ways to communicate and make that work pretty well.

Don Patrick: Have you done any of that?

Mike Tarrant: I’m not as great at it as I would like to be, but we’re working on some of that with the marketing folks to really kind of help us all with LinkedIn and whatnot and things like that. So that’s in the infancy stage, but we’re pretty good with the email part, touching base after a convention or an event with that.

But I think the commitment to it was really the biggie. That really goes a long way. And I think the other big point for me would be just knowing why you’re there, why you do what you do, kind of know your story, who you are, what you do and why you do it, be able to communicate that and relate it to your designated audience to address their pain points.

And if they can see your sincerity and why you’re there and you’re really there to help, yeah, they know you’ve got stuff to sell, but at the same time, people are looking for advice, right? So I think that’s the biggie is just know the reasons you’re in business and how you can help people is a good way to tell your story.

Don Patrick: That’s great advice. So I just recalled what I was going to ask and it’s getting away from the niche marketing, more in terms of branding because you have a fairly new website. So when you first came over to IfG, I think you branded under IfG initially to make it simple.

Mike Tarrant: I did.

Don Patrick: Is that correct? And you had kind of like a landing page or something if I recall correctly. But then the last year or two, you’ve created a whole new branding around your hobby, which you can share that with us and the website. Give us the website.

Mike Tarrant: Yeah. So the website is tarrantfinancial.com and we have a train theme happening there. So I’m into model railroading and railroading history and the way that railroads have tied people together was really what drove my interest in that. So I’m really not so much of an engineer type that wants to know how the prime mover works and the tractive effort and all this other stuff.

I just think they look cool and I like the way they connect people. Our country’s infrastructure was built around the railroads and that’s how people used to travel, and how cities were founded, and so forth. And I just, especially here in the Atlanta area, it’s an entirely railroad-based town.

All the highways follow the old railroads. That’s just where it all started. And of course, you’ve got all the 1800s history of the area tied into the railroads as well. So that’s what led into that. And of course, my boys decided they wanted to be into it too. And once that happened, it just, it’s been downhill ever since.
We’re all in. So, yeah, I was branding under Integrated Financial Group when I first moved over, created a website for that, marketing collateral and so forth. And like we were mentioning earlier, clients really, once you’ve got great relationships, they really are more interested in, “Where are you? How do I find you? And what are your resources? And what does that mean for me?” That’s really all they care about. So when I decided to actually finally put my name on the business, that was a big deal after 30 years of being in business and not having my name on it. And this was more because of the future direction of the practice where I’m envisioning having a few more advisors on my team, having more of a diminished role in the sense of not being the sole rainmaker, but I just, I can’t serve everyone.

There’s too many people. So I need to broaden that out a little bit and just felt like from a marketing point of view, from a succession point of view, it made more sense to kind of come up with our own look and feel and start promoting that in the pharmacy profession and within our existing clients who are non-pharmacists too.

And oddly enough, Don, when we broadcast that, we had questions about, “Have you moved?” Like, “No, we’re still in the same place.” “Oh, so what’d you do different?” It’s the same people, same office, same everything. I just felt like after 30 years, let’s put my name on it. And that was great. And then other people said, “Wow, Mike, congrats on starting your own business.”

So there’s a lot of positives that came out of it. I was not expecting, but if I would say one thing about it, Don, it gives you a different level of confidence in the sense that, you know, hey, this is a business that we’re trying to build, that we want to be successful, that we want to reach people with and help people with, and you just find you’ve got another level of confidence and another arrow in the quiver.

Don Patrick: That’s great. Well, I’m going to wrap this thing up with a couple of questions. So, Mike, use three words to describe your talents and strengths.

Mike Tarrant: Well, I would go with persistence. I would go with problem-solving and probably delegation.

Don Patrick: Yeah, I would agree with that.

Mike Tarrant: As I kind of looked through that, I was told early in my career that I could not succeed. I was told early that I’m not sales-oriented enough. I’m too introverted. I’m too methodical, too analytical. And Don, I’m going to tell you, that’s exactly what I needed to hear. Because, try not to get too emotional here, but in my dad’s side of the family especially, never really believed in saying no or I can’t.
And one thing I learned early was, if you really feel called to something and believe in something, put your all into it. And then if you fail, you can still hold your head high, but don’t ever tell yourself that you can’t do something. And so, when I was told that by one of the lead advisors at the other firm, that was literally all I needed to hear. And so I’m very grateful for that. So I’ll just say if you’re, for those who might be having a hard time, just keep being persistent. If you feel called to this, keep going after it because your calling is going to motivate you to succeed.

Don Patrick: That’s great advice. Fantastic advice.

Mike Tarrant: Surround yourself with a good team. I just think it’s crucial. No person’s an island. We really need people to help us. And it actually is perceived a lot better from clients too if you’ve got some people around you. They know you’re not the only one they can go to. So I think delegation’s important too. Empower people for things they’re talented for. And yeah, problem solving. I love getting in those weeds and figuring out how I can help people, solve their problems, and have a better life.

Don Patrick: Yeah, you are fantastic at it. So tell us something about yourself that others don’t know.

Mike Tarrant: Alrighty. Well, I’m going to take a lead from Matt here and I’m going to tell you it’s something with food.

I’m actually a quarter Italian believe it or not and I hold my head high with that one-fourth of me. That comes from my mother’s side of the family. The Talarico’s, they immigrated from Italy in the early 1900s and my mother can make an amazing dish of homemade ravioli and that is our Christmas eve dinner. So yeah, even though I’m born and bred here in the south, I will claim that I am one-fourth Italian.

Don Patrick: Ah, that makes me hungry. Oh my gosh. And it takes her probably three, four days to create that spread, I bet.

Mike Tarrant: It does. It does. Yep.

Don Patrick: Yeah, and the smell and the garlic and the olive oil. Oh my gosh.

Mike Tarrant: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. All right. Let’s go. I’m ready. I’m starving.

Don Patrick: Mike, this has been fantastic. Thank you again for taking this time and sharing with your fellow consortium members. You have so much to share, so much to learn from you and how you run your business, your passion for the business, how you got in your persistence. This has been fun for me, learned a lot, and I know everybody else will.

Mike Tarrant: Great, Don. Thank you so much. Can’t believe it’s already been an hour.

Don Patrick: I know. It’s fun, isn’t it?

Mike Tarrant: Yeah, I really appreciate it. It’s great chatting with you.

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.